


White Rabbit

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Alex Summers is still the nexus of all realities, Alex Summers loves rocks., Alternate Universe - Canon, Apocalypse is nigh, Engineers, F/M, Family Drama, Gen, Graduate School, Mad Science, No really I'm retiring from the spandex business, Outsider's Arc/Pantheon, PTSD, Parenthood, Parents & Children, Pseudoscience, Science Fiction, The war isn't over in an afternoon, Time Shenanigans, What would happen if the X-Men actually got to grow up and get on with their lives?, You can't ever really retire from the spandex business, children with special needs, mutant nations and world police, remember the Mutant X comic book?, timestream hopping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-11
Updated: 2012-08-11
Packaged: 2017-11-11 22:39:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 31
Words: 202,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/483642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex Summers has always known that you don't leave the X-Men behind for good. As he embarks on a new life in the 'ordinary' world, Alex tries to strike a balance between being a civilian geologist and being Havok. But his two worlds are about to collide in an event that changes them both forever and Alex finds himself drawn back into 'the good fight' in a way he never expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. August 2000 - February 2002

**Author's Note:**

  * For [antiochene](https://archiveofourown.org/users/antiochene/gifts), [sevenall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenall/gifts).



> This was written in 2001 as a bridge between Alicia MacKenzie's Outsider Arc and Pantheon series of stories and edited last year. As such, it features relationships and OCs that belong to her (and to SarahCascade, who created Dana), but is entirely readable as a standalone story set in a 616-compliant world (circa 2000) where time moves forward, everyone gets older, and En Sabah Nur is the baddie.

"A, B, C, D, E, F, G..." Alex Summers sang quietly to himself as he wandered down the aisle, head tilted at an awkward angle so he could read call numbers as he went. A quick look up the aisle showed that there was a woman there and Alex made a point of remembering not to walk right into her. Attractive as she was, most women did not find being bowled over appealing as a come-on. Instead, he concentrated on finding his book, flicking the finger with the Post-it attached to it and unconsciously moving his eyes down the rows of books in time to the beat he was setting with the tiny neon pink paper. 

His second week back in the swing of things and he was still buzzed. Normal life. Graduate school. No skin-suits, no Danger Room, no having to pretend that it wasn't Guido who hadn't cleaned out the hair trapper over the shower drain. Now it was Princeton instead of the Xavier Institute or Headquarters in DC. Now he had griping classmates he had to sit in seminar with and then part from instead of griping teammates he had to live with and never not see. Now the greatest evil in the universe was no longer En Sabah Nur but instead the Registrar. Life was good. 

He stopped when it looked like the call number range he needed was right where the woman was standing. She was leaning a book against an empty space on a shelf and he grumbled to himself about Murphy's Law dictating that whatever book he needed would be on the bottom shelf and in someone else's way.

"Excuse me," he said quietly, waiting for the woman to look up before gesturing with his Post-it finger where he needed to be. Giving him a quick half-smile as she tucked a loose strand of brown hair behind her ear, she took a step back, leaving the book on its shelf and gently kicking her backpack behind her as she moved. Alex noticed that she had runner's legs, trim and tapered without being skinny, as he crouched down on his haunches to avoid having to kneel on the dusty tile floors. 

The book wasn't there. Alex hissed his irritation through his teeth. Who the hell (else) would need a fifty-year-old treatise on process geomorphology? The computer catalog had said that it wasn't checked out, but he hadn't counted on it being lost. He scanned the shelf again in case it had been put back in the wrong place, double checked his call number... and then mentally smacked himself. He needed the QE's and he was in the QC's.  

Too embarrassed to admit to such, Alex made a quiet noise of frustration as if the book was missing and got up, smiling in apology to the woman watching him as he did so. 

"You want the next aisle over," she said with a wry smile, gesturing behind her with one hand while gesturing with her chin at his Post-It. "Unless you're actually interested in electrical field theory."

Alex's shoulders sagged in defeat. So much for not making a fool of himself. "I'm having a bad alphabet day," he admitted, scratching the back of his head absently. "I'm rusty."

"Rusty with the alphabet?" An arched eyebrow. 

"With thinking," Alex elaborated. "It's been a while since I've had to do anything other than focus on a variation of 'breathe in, breathe out.'" And the funny thing, he added to himself, was that it was mostly true. 

"Mmm," the woman said, lips pursed in an obvious attempt to hold back a comment. Her eyes were twinkling and Alex fought the impulse to get ready to defend himself. 

"You might as well spit it out," he told her instead. "Someone should have fun at my expense and it probably won't be me."

"Oh, I wasn't going to laugh at you," she replied with a smile, shifting her posture and checking with one hand that the sunglasses hanging out of the pocket of her denim shorts were still there. Princeton was still very much a chinos-and-blazer kind of place, but this was still before the semester began and, well, nobody in the sciences dressed very formally. "At least not until you say what you were really looking for instead of hundred-year-old Russian texts on the future discoveries of electrical engineering."

"Can we open them to see if they're right about any of it?" Alex asked mischievously. "Actually, I was looking for an old German book on process geomorphology."

"You're a Civvie?"

"A wha?" Alex gave his best Confused Summers look. Guaranteed to get the girl every time. Rumor had it even Domino was not immune to it. 

"A civil engineer, which apparently you're not," the woman elaborated, leaning back against the shelves as a pair of students walked by whispering in Chinese.  

"Geology," Alex said. 

"Ah," she replied, eloquently mischievous in her expression. Alex thought she looked part Asian - there was something about the set of her eyes. "Rocks."

"You make it sound like such a dirty word," Alex chided, putting on his best wounded expression. "Like 'Philosophy' or 'Comp Lit'... well, that's two words. But you get my point."

That earned him an amused smile and he was about to go on when he heard someone call out in a loud whisper. 

"Lily!"

The woman turned and the smile she gave the approaching man told Alex all that he needed to know. Giving a quick, tight smile to the woman - apparently named Lily - when she turned back to him, Alex headed off to find his book. Already having been accepted as a protégé by John Frohmeyer, one of the most respected geomorphologists in terms of field work currently working in the United States, _and_ having all of his credits transferred without issue, it was too much to hope for that everything good from his first stint in grad school would come back... although perhaps he'd get a bit more work done this time around if he wasn't trying to juggle a relationship and his exams. And fighting evil. But he had mostly taken care of the fighting evil part.

By the time he walked past the aisle after finding his book (on a different bottom shelf), Lily and her boyfriend were gone. 

* * *

_ZAKKKK_

"Head's _UP_!" Cyclops called out as the satellite dish came crashing to earth. With Phoenix currently occupied tracking down escapees, there was no one to slow the massive dish's descent and the ground shook as it impacted and Alex braced to retain his balance as he looked around for anything that might have been shaken loose and make a new danger as a result. 

An eye in the sky to spot hazards above would have been nice, but if the choice was between Jean chasing the runners or providing a telekinetic umbrella, it was going to be the former every time. If the X-Men had learned anything from the increase in Sentinel attacks, it was that for every fugitive they let free, four more seemed to pop up to support them. The Sentinel population was not diminishing despite best efforts from all around. 

Inside the compound's main house, a team worked on getting in to any rooms that might hold crucial plans or databases. Just blowing the place to smithereens would be easier and, quite frankly, more enjoyable. But in what was rapidly becoming a war of attrition, there had to be a change in tactics if the X-Men were going to have any success. And if they would not rescind their standing policy regarding the taking of life, then there had to be other changes. And that was why Psylocke's badly burned and lacerated leg - a result of a risky mission that would not have been undertaken only a few months before - had been considered a fair exchange for a chance to gain information. 

"So," Iceman called over as he toyed around with the ice block he was using to freeze three Sentinels in place without killing them. They were unconscious, but there was no point in taking any chances. "How's civilian life?"

"What civilian life?" Havok made a face as he realized that he had overestimated the width of the obstructed keyhole. All he had meant to do was bore a hole through the tumblers, but now he'd have to melt the entire doorknob and lock. He sighed as the molten metal alloy and burned plastic slid down the steel door - whatever the damned thing had been reinforced with was pretty impressive. "We're in," he announced into his headset as a kick to the door sent it swinging slowly open.

"You know, the one you have when you're not getting called back to the mansion for drills or emergency missions," Iceman elaborated as he quickly froze the pool of molten metal that was starting to burn a hole in the floor. 

"I told Cyke that I'll drill once a month and if I feel like it," Havok replied as they looked around at the wall of computers. "And look how well that worked out."

That had been a rather unpleasant conversation, although it had gone a lot less poorly than had the original one. With both Apocalypse and the Sentinels running around in addition to the usual contingent of mutant supervillains, Alex had known that Havok was much more likely to be needed than otherwise might have been the case. Even if neither Scott nor Lorna (his successor as head of X-Factor) had broached the topic of a full return, Alex knew he'd have to expect a few recalls. After a similarly-recalled Archangel had gotten himself shot during a maneuver that should have been elementary for him had he been training regularly, Cyclops had insisted that Alex return to Westchester regularly to drill in the Danger Room and had unilaterally decided on a training routine for anyone who wanted to consider themselves part of the reserves. That Alex had wanted to consider himself part of the _retired_ had not factored in. Nor would it, hence most of the shouting. 

Alex had tried to appeal to logic and reason - it was impractical from both an academic and a logistic perspective to be running between Central Jersey and Westchester every weekend to get his ass whipped in the Danger Room. Scott, unmoved by Alex's threat to transfer to a school too far away to be commuting distance, had eventually compromised - only after Jean had gotten involved - to a twice-a-month schedule, but Alex had intended for it to only be temporary. Even if Scott chose not to recognize the firmness of his decision. 

"You want first crack or should I?" Iceman asked as he made an irritated noise at the computer. 

"I'll do it," Havok replied, sitting down. "Don't want you getting ice chips on the keyboard."

"Geez. You'd think they'd use something other than Windows," Iceman muttered as he watched Havok boot down the computer and dig out a disk from his utility belt. "Didn't _Independence Day_ teach them anything?"

Rebooting with Shadowcat's customized override-and-destroy program, Havok set up the uplink; they'd copy all of the files, infect the network with some specially-built worms, and then reduce the machine itself to scrap.  "Are there any useful papers lying around?" 

"A ton," Iceman replied from the other end of the console. "Are they useful? Well, that's the question. I can't read Bulgarian. I guess we'll take everything and then lock Colossus in a room with them."

"Can _he_ read Bulgarian?"

"It uses a Cyrillic alphabet," Iceman replied with a shrug. "It'll be easier for him to learn than for us."

"All right," Havok announced, standing up. "We're done and confirmed. Grab what we're taking and let's get out of here. The stink from the melting plastic is going to be noxious and the further away we get Wolverine from the smell, the less he'll bitch on the ride home."

* * *

"'We Can Smell What the Rock is Cooking', 'We Can Rock like the Rolling Stones', 'We Can Rock You Like a Hurricane'..."

"Okay, stop at the Scorpions reference," Alex cried out, waving his hands as if he were drowning and signaling for a lifeguard. "Who put you in charge of designing the department t-shirts and where did you get the pictures of them with a goat?"

Rob sighed dramatically and gave Stephanie, nearly dying of laughter next to him, a withering look. "I've been doing this for three years," he replied. 

"That's because nobody else will," Sanjay retorted from his safe position on top of the short bookcase. "You bring brown-nosing the department secretary to new levels."

"Or maybe I'm just good at it?" Rob suggested. 

"That's not it. That's definitely not it," Valeri said as he crossed the Geosciences lounge carrying pizza boxes. "There were suggestions involving investigating cracks last year."

"They were funny," Rob defended. 

"That's because you're Mister Rainforests and Green, Leafy Things and have no taste," Stephanie told him as she stood up. "For those of us who actually toil in the ground because we don't have radical environmentalists leaving _us_ money…"

Right on cue, everyone groaned. The Geosciences department was wildly uneven in the funding it could secure and those in the more popular fields - like Rob in Environmental - did much better off than the rest of the students, whose research often as not depended on the unrelated (and often unlikable) motivations of both nations and men. Paul's grant was from some tiny post-Soviet Bloc country that wanted to double its GNP by proving that dinosaurs used to roam its southern districts. Alex himself had spent his winter break getting paid to use hydrology to settle a land dispute that would decide the fate of a silver mine. ("Greed is often at the root of beneficence," Frohmeyer had told him when the check had come.)

"I like the 'pictures with a goat' theory," Ji-Won added, dropping the plastic bags containing the soda and ice on the table with a grunt. 

"Yo, Primakov," Paul called from where he was digging out the supply of plastic cups and paper plates. "Why are you carrying the pizza and making Ji-Won do the heavy lifting?"

"She's stronger than I am," Valeri replied easily, taking off his hat and unbuttoning his pea coat. 

Alex pointedly looked at Ji-Won, who weighed all of eighty pounds. Ji-Won shrugged, flexing her dainty fingers. "Ever see a Russian whimper? It was so not pretty."

"Actually, I have seen a Russian whimper. And sulk," he answered, thinking back to Piotr. He actually missed the big guy. "You probably had the right idea. They are dangerous in their wounded pride."

"Uh, guys," Valeri interrupted, sorting the pizza boxes by their contents. "I thought this was a 'Pick on Rob' event."

"Indeed it is," Sanjay agreed, hopping down off the bookcase and clapping his hands together with glee. "But I am much more withering in my sarcasm on a full stomach. You are merely the warm-up act. The appetizer."

"Well, here's the entrée. Left is meat, middle is veggie, and right is omnivore," Stephanie announced as she lifted the box lids. "Oooh, you remembered the olives."

"I don't know, Summers," Paul warned as he settled on the couch with his pizza and a beer. "You better start sharing your tricks for getting the takeout back to the lounge without it cooling off or you're going to be on every food run until you're outta here."

Alex managed to smile easily as he bit into his own originally still-hot-but-not-that-hot slice that he had surreptitiously warmed up. Eight months into grad school and he was still normal. Well, as normal as any grad student could be. He had found a cohort to join, had gotten used to the local routine - East Coast Ivy League versus southwestern state university was as much a change as X-Men was to X-Factor - and had settled in to his new life. He had the dinky's schedule memorized, could announce with a nearly straight face that he was making a Wawa's run and did anyone need anything, and was on a first name-basis with both the late-night librarian and the late-morning hostess at the pancake house. 

There had been a few moments over the past semester-and-change where Alex had had to talk his way out of potentially interesting situations. Going to visit his brother on the weekends was within normal parameters, but the questions about what he had done in between his grad school stints had petered out after he had said that his most recent job had been with a government contractor - at some point Paul had apparently told everyone that that was what Delta Force operatives said and Alex had already admitted to some paramilitary training. A couple of unexplained mid-week disappearances added to the non-story and he was immensely grateful that none of his Havok-related activities had been captured on any sort of film. Oh, for the invisibility that had been so useful in his time in Australia...

"Earth to Alex," Ji-Won called to him, waving her hand in front of his face. 

"Sorry," he said. "What did I miss?"

"Sanjay has eaten enough to be ready to start insulting Rob now," Paul answered. "In case it turns out to be a virtuoso performance, we wanted you to be able to fully appreciate it from the beginning."

"It's always a virtuoso performance," Alex answered with a smile, raising his glass to Sanjay, who nodded. "But I wouldn't want to miss it."

Four hours later, after the pizza was consumed and the systematic rejection of every one of Rob's t-shirt slogans complete and the night guard had come to warn them that the building closed at ten, the group broke up for the evening. By dint of pure luck, Alex's apartment was in the opposite direction of everyone else's - his late application for housing had put him on the waiting list, which in turn had left him free to take a sublet from an adjunct professor who had gotten a last-minute fellowship in Germany - and he waved goodbye to the crew and started the long walk home. 

March was supposed to come in like a lion and out like a lamb, but Alex had spent enough time in Westchester to know that that didn't happen in the Greater Tri-State area. In fact, the reverse was usually true and after two weeks of almost-early-spring-like weather - groundhog on Staten Island be damned - the air had turned brutally cold the previous weekend. While Alex didn't especially mind the change in temperature, he could appreciate everyone else's frustration. 

Passing the museum, Alex noted a lone figure waiting by the bus stop and felt sympathy as he drew closer - there was no bus service tonight. There had been signs posted, but between the high winds and Facilities' overzealous war on all paper flyers and posters, none remained. As if on cue, the wind picked up slightly and Alex, unbothered except for the wind in his eyes, was reminded that freaky genetics were not all bad.

Another gust of wind blew and Alex squinted. The woman at the bus stop turned away from the wind and towards him and Alex realized he she looked familiar, although after eight months on campus that probably wasn't as uncommon as it once had been. But from where... the glint of the streetlight flashed on a textbook and Alex connected the dots. 

"Lily, right?" He asked, walking up to the woman.

She looked at him warily. "Yeah?"

"We met in the library at the start of the academic year. You made fun of my rocks," he said. "I was having alphabet issues."

Recognition dawned. "Hi," she said less suspiciously. "I'd offer to shake your hand, but..." she gestured down with her chin to bare hands balled up and pulled into her coat sleeves. "I left my mittens in Montreal."

"Is that like leaving your heart in San Francisco?" Alex asked. 

Lily frowned at him. "If you're going to tease a freezing woman on a cold night, at least give me your name so I can scribble nasty things about you on the bathroom wall."

"Alex Summer, Geosciences," he said, then frowned. "You do know that there's no bus tonight, right?"

"What?" Lily squeaked. "Why would they do that on a night like this... and why isn't there a sign?"

"There were, but we had a storm," Alex explained, waving his hand in the general direction of a pile of fallen branches. 

"I wasn't here for that," Lily replied ruefully. "Shit... err, pardon my language."

"I've said worse," Alex scoffed. "I can curse in... six languages, I think." Seven if you counted Shi'ar, but Alex didn't want to do so lest he be asked for a demonstration. "Can I walk you somewhere? It's kind of late... I'd offer you a cell phone to call someone, but I don't have mine with me."

Strategic forgetfulness with the phone didn't get him out of all X-Men-related business, not with both Cerebro and telepaths who knew his predilections at hand, but it cut down on the summoning for the less-urgent business that Scott had a nasty habit of calling emergencies just because he could. 

"It's all right," Lily replied, shaking her head, pursing her lips in bemused frustration. "I have mine but I don't have anyone to call. When I told Evan that I didn't want to see him until hell froze over, a cold night in Princeton wasn't exactly what I had in mind. Apt, perhaps, but not what I had in mind."

Alex hoped he didn't look too happy about that, even if she didn't seem too disappointed by her apparently newly-singly status. "So can I escort you to a more populated area?" he asked instead.

"I don't want to take you out of your way, especially if you're only going to have to walk home," she replied, but Alex didn't miss the note of hopefulness in her voice. 

"I'll be fine, don't worry," Alex promised. "So, which way?"

Forty minutes later, Alex was pretty sure he was going to do whatever it took for Lily to go out with him. He had first had the thought as they passed by an advertisement for a movie and they had both blurted out the same inappropriate-but-funny comment on the innuendo-laced tag line. But any doubts faded by the time they had passed the pet supply store. The store had a parrot cage in the window with a stuffed parrot toy in the cage. The parrot was apparently attached to the perch, but it was listing badly and Lily had launched right into Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch. Alex had joined in and they had been able to go through it all the way until the second chorus of The Lumberjack Song, by which point both of them were laughing too hard to continue.

Yes, Alex had a very fraught history with women, but Lily was not like anyone he'd met in the spandex set. And he was well aware that that was no small part of the attraction. An attraction that was impervious even to Lily still not thinking much of his chosen field. 

"Geology isn't a real science," she retorted after Alex made a statement about the sciences in general. "You talk to rocks." 

"Not everything in science has to have an impact on the average person's daily life."

"That's why we have the liberal arts. All it does is make them overqualified to work at The Gap." 

"I like The Gap." 

"I rest my case."

"You're such an engineer," Alex accused.

"I am," Lily preened outrageously and then laughed. "And I'm also down the block from my apartment. Is this where you confess that you live on the other side of campus and won't get home until three in the morning?"

"It'll take me twenty minutes," Alex assured her. Yes, he was across town, but he still worked out every day and ran a respectable mile.

"Are you sure?"

"I suppose it could be twenty-four minutes, but that's only because I have really bad luck with the traffic lights in this town."

Lily still looked thoughtful, and all of a sudden, Alex had a brilliant idea. "Do you want me to call you once I get home? Let you know I didn't get kidnapped and used for bacon by one of the eating clubs?"

She eyed him closely for a moment, but then shrugged. "Well, you already know where I live," she replied with an air of exaggerated resignation and shrugged. 

* * *

"Wicket."

"I was five when it came out. Ewoks are cute when you're five. Like teddy bears."

"You had Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, heck even Lando Calrissian and you chose _Wicket_? I would have gone with Princess Leia...Definitely Leia."

"I was always Princess Leia when we played. Wicket makes perfect sense."

"But Leia had other sidekicks. R2-D2. C-3PO. The Alliance leader who looked like a walrus."

"They had the cartoon and they were cute and fuzzy and..."

"Chewbacca was cute and fuzzy, too. And he could handle a blaster."

"Chewbacca was not cute."

"But he could fly a ship. Ewoks couldn't even drive the speeder-bikes."

"Some of us look for something other than guns and driving skills."

"Am I supposed to take that personally?"

"You rear-ended a Salvation Army dumpster."

"It was a love tap."

"You're lucky the rental place didn't notice it."

"I blinded them with my charm and personality."

"You left me standing outside in a wet sundress."

"Same thing."

"You know..."

"Wicket."

"You're not going to let this one go, are you?"

"Nope."

"Come on, our table's ready."

"You do realize what I'm going to have to give as our name from now on..."

"Don't you dare."

* * *

"Shit."

"Alex?" Scott's voice sounded almost amused through the phone. "I know that wasn't just a reaction to me asking you to help us out."

"No," Alex sighed, looking around his tiny apartment as if the walls would give him any clues as to what to do. "I've just got to figure out a way to break a date without having to say what I'm doing. I can't exactly tell Lily that I'll make it up to her after I go melt down some mutant-hating killing machines."

There was a Sentinel nest in Idaho; Scott had called him as a last resort. This Alex knew. He also knew that there was no way he could not say yes. The X-Men were spread too thin as it was dealing with some terror-du-jour that he normally wouldn't hear about until Jean let it slip during a get-together. The timing sucked, as Sentinel timing usually did. But he couldn't just e-mail Bastion and tell him that his first solo-authored article in one of the Holy Trinity of morphology journals had a hard deadline of next week. 

"Tell her you have a lab?"

"She's an engineer," Alex replied, looking over his paper-strewn desk. Journal articles, library books, notes, Post-its, and a photo of Jean and Scott in a frame. It bothered Alex that he couldn't keep any pictures of his former teammates - who also happened to be his friends - around lest someone visiting make the connection. The same went for magazines with mutant-related articles and the like. 

"So?" 

"Engineers never believe anyone else has more inconvenient labs than they do," Alex explained, feeling that weird weariness that came with having to explain the graduate school hierarchy to an outsider. "Besides, she's in lab now."

He let his eyes fall on the photo he kept attached to the fridge. It was of him and Lily during their weekend trip to Cape May. She was wearing a Portland Winterhawks t-shirt over her bathing suit (not that Lily needed to cover up, but Alex found something refreshing in her modesty and never nagged her about it) and his hair was all spiky from the salt water and they were grinning like escaped lunatics. Which, in a sense, they had been. 

"Family emergency?" Scott sounded much too amused. 

"Do you want to have to remember whatever it is I'm going to tell her for the next time you see her?" Alex asked with some irritation. Jean and Scott had met Lily twice, both times in Manhattan for dinner. Jean liked her immensely, which made sense in a weird way because she had always warned him that he'd end up with a woman who wouldn't put up with his more annoying quirks. "She's going to remember. And ask you about it."

"Make it happen to Dad," Scott suggested and he sighed. Scott was definitely having too much fun with this.

"I haven't said anything about Dad," Alex replied, letting his agitation seep into his voice. Lily was perceptive to know that there were certain parts of Alex's past that he wasn't comfortable talking about. She knew a skeleton history of his family, although Alex had had to dance around many of the details of his father and all of the details about his nephew. "That comes after I explain you."

What had been a hypothesis in March was now an evidence-supported conclusion, but not an untroubled one. Alex loved Lily enough to tell her so, but he had not even gotten so far as mentioning that he was a mutant, let alone everything that came with it. And he was well aware that that 'everything' was all well past its expiry date in terms of what he could justify keeping from her and still credibly say that they had an honesty-based relationship. It was fear on his own part - fear that Lily would leave him - or worse, would hate him -- because of what he was and what he had been. The X-Men were not superheroes to everyone. He knew Lily was uncomfortable with the notion that he had formerly been some sort of government agent - he had never disabused anyone of the Delta Force rumor that had never quite died out - and while he had never seen or heard her say anything derogatory about mutants, they had never discussed it, either. Another part of Alex's necessary double life, another part that he had not anticipated before he had left X-Factor to be a civilian.

"Hey," Scott protested. "What am I supposed to tell you? I've never had to come up with a cover story for a girlfriend before. You're the one who wanted to go out with normal women, right?"

There was the sound of sharp contact, a yelp of pain that only partially satisfied Alex, and then the sound of the phone receiver being put back to a mouth. 

"You could just tell her," Jean's voice came on the line. "You two have been going out long enough."

"Jean," Alex half-whined, half-sighed. 

"What?" Jean retorted. "It's been almost a year, Alex. You love her, right? You're serious about her, right? The longer you wait, the more it's going to hurt."

"It's not a Band-Aid," Scott could be heard muttering in the background. 

"I'm not going to argue with you about that," Alex sighed, running his fingers through his hair, then frowning as he realized he'd tied himself up completely in the phone cord. He'd gotten so used to the cordless he'd had last year. "But it's not the sort of thing one leaves on an answering machine as a reason for why dinner plans have to be cancelled at the last minute. Can't you just use Cerebro..."

"Alex!" Jean barked. "Tell her it's a family emergency, and then when you get back you tell her the truth." 

"She'll forgive me for lying to her?" Alex asked skeptically. He personally didn't think Lily would. 

"No," Jean replied. "She's going to be so pissed off at you for not telling her that you're Havok that it will get lost in the larger explosion."

"That's not a comf... ow," Alex grumbled. "That was Betsy in my head. My ride is here."


	2. February 2002

"Umm... Hi. It's me. I'm back home and I'm _really_ sorry I didn't call you and I have a lot to explain to you but I don't want to do it over the phone, so when you get this call me back or just come over or I'll come over there and I'll grovel and try to explain how while I don't really have a good excuse why I didn't call you, I kinda sorta have a reason... I'll see you soon. I love you."

Lily put down her backpack with a thud and debated whether to try to work out her aggravation now or wait until she saw Alex. 

"You never tell my answering machine that you love it unless you think I'm going to be pissed off," she told the echo of his voice. "And you only ramble when you're nervous."

It was Friday afternoon, the fifth day in a row she had spent all of the daylight hours either in a windowless materials lab or a windowless electric propulsion lab. Two of those days had required her playing kindergarten cop for a couple of undergrad optics sessions, with the rest of those days plus two additional ones spent working on the group research project that was only going to get her "special thanks to" on the journal article. And one day only had been spent on her own research. 

Alex had left her a rushed and confusing message on Monday afternoon, mumbling something about a family emergency and him going off to meet his brother. He had said that he expected to be home sometime late Tuesday or early Wednesday and if he was going to be any later, he'd call her. 

Initially, she had been too concerned to be angry that Alex had to back out of their plans. They made it a point once every two weeks to spend an evening doing nothing involving grad school - going to the movies, going out to dinner far away from campus, once they had gone bowling - and Monday night had been it. But it was an emergency, so she had given their tickets to the Disney movie to Orly and Xiao rather than go out and have a good time while Alex was obviously worried about something. But she hadn't canceled any of her other plans to sit by the phone and wait for an update. After eleven months, she could translate the Alex-speak. If he had actually been planning on trying to reach her before he had gotten home, he would have phrased it differently. But when there was no message on her answering machine when she got home from her _very_ long day at the lab on Wednesday, Lily had started to get worried. 

Thursday afternoon, she had checked her messages from the phone outside the propulsion lab - maybe possibly reconsidering her decision that she really didn't need a cell phone -- and found nothing. She didn't have Alex's brother's number in Westchester and information couldn't provide a number for either a Scott Summers or a Jean Summers in Salem Center. Lily vaguely remembered that Jean had hyphenated her last name but didn't know what it was, so she couldn't try that, either. Emailing a few of Alex's buddies in the geosciences department had gotten her nowhere - none of them had a number for Westchester and Paul had reminded her about Delta Force. 

Personally, Lily didn't think Alex was in Delta Force or part of any kind of shadowy civilian organization, although it certainly was a plausible story. He'd had a soldier's training, that was for sure. And he'd get this haunted, harrowed look every once in a while - sometimes if the news was on, but sometimes it could be as simple as watching kids in a playground. It was the same one that Lily had seen in her grandfather and the other veterans she'd walk past at the VA hospital back in Oregon. She'd never directly asked, but she'd always assumed that Alex had a stint in either the Army or Marines - most likely Army because the Marines were a cult and he'd never have hidden membership in it - either before or after college. The timing would have worked out that he'd have possibly seen action and Lily, daughter and granddaughter of a combat veteran, knew better than to question him about it. 

But none of that mattered in this case - Alex was officially AWOL. 

Thursday night, she had come home and actually whimpered when there were no messages on her machine. The phone had rung at 11PM and Lily had overruled her own long-standing policy on not answering the phone after ten in the hope that it was Alex, but it wasn't. It was Grandma Ina, who at this stage of the onset of her dementia Lily wasn't about to waste energy telling that there was a three-hour time difference between here and there. That would involve breaking Grandma Ina's heart by telling her that she wasn't in Korea anymore. 

By Friday morning, any lingering sympathy for Alex was gone. If something had happened to either Scott or Jean or someone in Alex's family, five days was long enough for him to find a free moment to get to a phone. Especially because Alex _did_ have a cell phone. In a fit of pique, Lily had deleted all of the emails from Alex's friends wondering if Lily had heard anything from him.

The phone rang, shaking her out of her reverie. Knowing who it probably was, she still picked it up.

"Hello?"

"Hi... I'm sorry. I owe you an apology and an explanation and... Jean's right. I waited too long."

"Well, on the assumption that she knows what the hell has been going on, then I'll agree with her."

"Lil... I can't do this over the phone. It's too much. Can I come over?"

"I still have my coat on. I'll come over there. It'll give you a fighting chance that I'll have cooled down enough not to cause permanent damage. I was _worried_ , Alex."

"And I gave you reason to be. And you sort of had reason to be... I'll explain it when you get over here."

"I'll see you in a few."

Lily picked up her keys and, looking around the apartment she had barely seen this past week, left. Alex lived a lot closer to her this year than last year, when a bicycle was necessary to get between their places. Much to her annoyance, the trek took only fifteen minutes. 

Alex opened the door before she even knocked and the snarky comments Lily had spent the walk preparing died on her lips upon seeing him. "What the hell happened to you?"

He looked like he hadn't slept since Monday and there was a long, ugly-but-healing gash starting at his left temple and ending below his cheekbone. Obviously just out of the shower, he was wearing sweats and a "Geologists like it rock hard" t-shirt and he looked like he was going to collapse. 

Instead of replying, Alex grimaced and gestured for her to come inside. He took her coat and tossed it on the back of the lounger he insisted on keeping despite the lack of room for it and followed. Lily sat down on the couch and looked up expectantly. 

Alex, bare feet slapping against the wood floor, paced. 

"Is this the sort of bad news that's going to make me too angry to eat?" Lily asked when the pause had moved past thoughtful through dramatic and on into uncomfortable. "Because if it is, I should eat something now. I skipped lunch."

"What makes you think it's bad news? Apart from the gore?"

"You're pacing," she replied with an ease that she did not feel. "You do that when you think you're in trouble. You operate on the faulty premise that I'd find a moving target harder to hit."

Alex smiled sadly at her. "Why don't I make some pasta?"

"I see." Actually, she really didn't see. Alex was looking guilty - and tired and sore - and while there were a ton of reasons why these could be the result of a family emergency, it could all also be the result of a week spent mountain climbing or skiing. 

She left him to putter around in the tiny kitchen alone until she heard a hiss of pain. Standing up, she could see all that he had done was pick up the cast iron pan with one hand. The pan wasn't hot - he was moving it to get to the pot he used for pasta - and she could feel concern warring with frustration and the awareness that whatever it was that Alex was going to tell her was going to be a game-changer. They were at a watershed, one Alex had led them to by intent, and she wasn't sure how - or if - they would move on from whatever awaited her. But for the time being, they could pretend that they were not at the edge of a cliff. 

"Let me do that," she said with slight exasperation, taking the pan from him with one hand and reaching over for the pasta pot with the other. "Can you at least tell me how badly you're hurt?"

"My shoulder's a bit of a mess," he admitted ruefully. "It's mostly healed, but the scar tissue's the problem. The rest is just cosmetic."

"How did you go from injury to healing to breaking up scar tissue in five days?" Lily asked, filling the pot with water and returning it carefully to the stove. "And how much is 'the rest' that just is cosmetic?"

"There's a reason I didn't try to hug you," Alex replied as he reached gingerly for the box of pinwheel-shaped pasta. "Beyond the fact that I didn't think you'd appreciate it."

Lily just shook her head. "What happened?"

"I want to tell you everything in order," Alex said, holding up a hand in defense at her frown. "For now, let's just say that Scott called me to help him with something that he thought would be very straightforward and turned out to be anything but."

Lily took this at face value. Scott, the few times she had met him, hadn't seemed like the type to be dragging his little brother on quixotic adventures in the middle of the semester. But there was something off about this... She didn't think Alex was lying. She just got the feeling that this was a gross oversimplification of the truth. The age difference between them - six years  ("I'm older, she's more mature," Alex told anyone who asked) - only occasionally manifested itself in any real way other than popular culture, but once in a while, Lily could hear an 'if you were older, you'd understand' tone in his voice. And while this was one of those times she expected it, it wasn't there. 

Instead of saying anything, Lily tried to get a look at the gash on Alex's face and raised her hand to turn his head. "Did you put anything on that... Alex! You're burning up! Is it infected - do you have a fever?" He felt hot to the touch. Not clammy, but hot. 

Alex sighed. "No, it's not infected, it's got anti-bacterial goo on it, and I don't have a fever. I'm just... nervous."

"Nervous enough to fry an egg on your forehead?"

"Now there's an image... I could, you know." 

"You could what?" Lily thought he was definitely feverish if there wasn't a non sequitur in there somewhere. 

"Fry an egg on my forehead," Alex replied casually. He turned and leaned against the counter, facing her. His eyes were bright and for a moment she thought it was a fever talking, but then she realized it was tears, unshed tears. "Or in my hand. Or across the room..."

"Alex, what are you talking about?" Were they not currently in the calm eye of a hurricane of a fight, she'd suspect Alex was making an elaborate joke to try to calm her down. But now he was speaking seriously without even a trace of a smile. 

"Haven't you ever noticed that my coffee never gets cold and my takeout always stays hot? Or that while the shower never has enough hot water for us to sufficiently goof off, the three times we've attempted to bathe together the water never even got tepid? Or that I don't own gloves and my hands are never cold? Or that my feet are never the freezing ones in bed?"

"I just thought that you had really good circulation," Lily said weakly. She had noticed these things, at least in passing, but despite all of the little reminders that this wasn't how heat flow worked when it came to the human body, she hadn't drawn any connection.

"There's a little more to it than that."

"You're a mutant," Lily said slowly, realization dawning like the sun. "You've got heat powers."

"Plasma production," Alex corrected. "I could solve your friend Xiao's demo problem with a flick of my finger."

Lily just let the news wash over her. It was surprising and not, agonizing and not. Her worst fears confirmed and her worst fears relieved. She loved Alex. Loved him in a way that was so different from any other feeling she had ever called by that name as to be laughable. She had allowed herself to think once - exactly once - about a future with him. Marriage. Children. Matching tenure tracks. But now... Sentinels. Genosha. Rampaging evil mutants bent on world domination, a constant war where civilians and collateral damage didn't matter. Where sometimes they were the targets... She and he weren't on the same _side_ any more. 

"Lily, say something? Please?" 

"I thought you were one once," she said quietly. Alex looked so afraid, afraid to touch her, afraid she'd run away. Just... afraid. "The way your head would turn if there were mutants on the news or if the X-Men had done something. But you were so good at hiding... I thought it was just a coincidence after a while. Or just an interest you had."

She couldn't decide whether it was better or worse than another woman or a child somewhere or whatever it was that she'd came up with to poke holes in his occasionally flimsy excuses.

"Well, the X-Men are a little more than just an interest," Alex said, then sighed. "I used to be one... And this week I was one again. Lily, meet Havok." 

He held out his hand, his face wrenched in a bitter smile, one tear falling.

Lily didn't move, still numb, until she was jarred into motion by Alex's face crumbling into something close to despair and his hand falling limply to his side. She reached out and grabbed the hand that was almost too hot to the touch, too hot to be simply _human_. 

"How do you do?" she asked in what she hoped sounded more friendly than frightened. She wasn't sure what to be other than scared. "I'm Lily Beck. We have a friend in common. Alex Summers."

He laughed mirthlessly. "I'm the same person, Lily. We're the same person."

"Not to me, you're not," she contradicted, still holding his hand. "I only know Alex... or at least part of him."

"It's time you got to meet the rest of him," Alex replied. He closed his eyes for a long moment and Lily was about to ask if he was all right when he nodded to himself and opened his eyes. "Someone will be here in about ninety minutes and we can go then."   
A wave of fear shot through her and she dropped his hand. 

"Go where? I'm not dressed to go anywhere," Lily sputtered. As if that mattered. This was spinning out of control, far past merely weird and on into surreal. Alex had gone from her slightly reserved boyfriend to an eerily familiar stranger in all of a couple of heartbeats and her ability to process all of it had been overwhelmed right around the word 'mutant' and well before 'Havok'. 

"Westchester," Alex said. "If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this right. Havok doesn't live here, he never has."

"How are we going to get there?" Lily asked, slightly snarly as confusion was being piled atop confusion, which in turn rested on a nest of mystery and untruths. So she grabbed on to what she _could_ control, to knowledge that wasn't likely to be turned on its ear in the next two minutes. "The dinky is a good half-hour from here, and we'd have to coordinate our departure to its schedule and then it's more than an hour into Penn Station and _then_ we'd have to get to Grand Central and take Metro-North... we wouldn't get there until late. And unless you think you can get Sanjay's car, we don't have a ride to drive up there ourselves."

"Jean's sending someone to pick us up," Alex replied, turning back to the unlit pot of water. "Now that I don't have to be subtle anymore," he muttered and held his hand over the water. In seconds, it began to boil rapidly and Alex turned on the burner like it was an afterthought.

Lily just stared, nauseated. She knew Alex was watching her, but she couldn't take her eyes off the boiling water. A voice in her mind was trying to tell her that Alex was dangerous - he could kill with a touch. She had seen footage of Havok in action, seen him melt guns into puddles and other terrifying acts that she had been raised to believe that people just didn't do. At least not outside of movies. So why wasn't she more scared that he'd hurt her?

"I'm freaking you out, aren't I?" 

"Just a little," Lily retorted without rancor, finally looking up as Alex gently grasped her arm. His hands weren't hot at all now. It was a human touch. "One minute you're a goofy geologist and the next you're an internationally wanted terrorist. I think freaking out is well within my purview." 

"The terrorism charges are highly overrated," Alex said with the air of someone casually giving a confidence. "Most of them stem from the fact that nobody wants to pay for the cleanup that comes from a battle between mutants. It's like a tax write-off."

"That doesn't ease my mind any, Alex," Lily replied tartly, looking up at him. And then she remembered something. "And how do you know that Jean is sending someone to fetch us?"

Alex made an apologetic face before sighing. "She said so," he explained, tapping his temple. "She's a telepath."

Lily rolled her eyes in frustrated disbelief and pulled out of Alex's grip. "I'm not sure I'm ready to go up to Westchester. It's too much. I don't even want to know what Scott does... Jean's read my mind?"

"Scott's the easiest one to figure out," Alex replied with a jolliness Lily knew he didn't feel as he reached for the pasta box. "And I doubt she's read your mind. She's very principled. She'll probably want to teach you how to shield, though. There are a lot of telepaths who aren't so well-intentioned."

The sudden change from Alex being worried about her to Alex being so blasé about everything pissed her off. It was like he was relieved that she hadn't stormed out and could now assure himself that everything would be okay and there were no lasting repercussions to his lies. 

"I'm going to go sit on the couch," Lily said sharply, avoiding Alex's attempt to reach for her and going back into the room. She could hear him putting the pasta into the water, then he followed her out of the kitchen. But once in the living room, he kept his distance and made no motion to either speak or approach her. They kept to their separate silences until the timer went off and Alex went back to the kitchen to drain the pasta. 

"I know this is a lot," he admitted as he returned. "And I know it's definitely too much to be dropping on you all at once. But... I can't keep all this from you anymore. It's hurting me and now it's starting to hurt us."

"So hurting me will balance everything else out?" Lily asked. She was more confused than angry by this point and it came out more sharply than she'd have liked. But Alex really wasn't in a position to overreact to anything she said, was he?

"Either we get through this or we don't, Lily," Alex said to her and she could hear the desperation in his voice. "The truth will either set us free or bury us."

"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" she shot back. "You can tell me that you love me and you can't even tell me that you're a mutant? That you used to be a fucking X-Man?"

"I was wrong," Alex admitted, rubbing his hands over his face vigorously. "I thought... I don't know what I thought... I left the superhero business because I wanted to be normal. Like I used to be before I had ever heard of mutants. I wanted to forget about being Havok and secret identities... X-Men have no lives. No friends outside the team, no hobbies, no day jobs, nothing. I wanted the life I had before I graduated college, before I found out what I was. I wanted to live like a human being - I _am_ a human being and that got lost while I was Havok. And then I met you and I wanted you to like me for who I wanted to be, who I thought I could be instead of who I was. But being Havok is who I am. I've fought it ever since I found out that I was a mutant. I don't take to it the way Scott and Jean do. But I can't pretend it doesn't exist. I'm being untruthful to me as well as to you… The last thing in the world I'd ever want to do is hurt you, Lily. You _have_ to know that. Even if I was being selfish and stupid, I didn't want you to pay for it for me."

"I look at you and I can't see anyone I know," she said quietly. "I saw what you wanted me to see. And I fell in love with the person you wanted to be. But now I don't know who you _are_ and I don't know how I feel about _him_."

Alex hissed in pain as he peeled off his t-shirt. "This is me," he said as he extended his arms out to his sides. She could see abrasions and cuts and bruises all down his left side. "Same heart, same body."

"But it's not the same body," she replied, shaking her head. "That Alex's body never boiled water by holding his hand over it."

"Actually, I did," Alex replied, smiling ironically. "I reheated food all the time and I kept myself warm in the winter and even cleared the front stoop the weekend the super was gone and we had that big snowstorm. I only use my microwave when someone else is over... I'm not just a living weapon, however long that took me to realize. My mutation is good for a lot of practical stuff, not just draining nuclear reactors and taking down Sentinels."

"Is that how you got hurt? Sentinels?"

There'd been Sentinels in the news this past week, but there were almost always Sentinels in the news and even if she'd occasionally wondered about Alex's attention to mutants, she'd never have made that kind of connection. 

"Yeah," he admitted wryly. "Idaho. It was a trap. We all got our asses handed to us. That's why I'm all cut up still. We only healed the serious stuff so everyone could get a change at the equipment. Our resident fix-it-all healer wasn't around." 

Lily watched as Alex headed back into the kitchen, shirt still in hand, to root around in the fridge. Minus the wounds, he did look the same. But...

"I'm not asking you to just take all this with a smile and a ton of good grace," he said as he came back out. "You are entitled to get as pissed off as you want. Hell, you're even encouraged to get pissed off. Just... let me explain everything to you before you decide one way or the other. You deserve the whole truth."

Lily really felt too tired to vehemently agree with him on that last point. Her mind was still spinning, parsing through the entire course of their relationship for moments that at the time were innocuous and now, in hindsight, could have been clues. How Alex always came back quickly when he went to heat up lunches at the labs - he never seemed to have to wait on line to use the lounge microwave on the first floor of the building and said he had good microwave karma. How _warm_ he had been when she had burrowed into his embrace at the Princeton-Dartmouth football game they had gone to last February... "That was you who melted Vermont Pete's notebook into the Dark Gallery, wasn't it?"

Alex smiled crookedly, which Lily knew was tantamount to his admitting guilt. 

Vermont Pete (given the epithet to distinguish him from the four other Petes in the Mechanical Engineering department) was the sort of grad student reviled by all - eager to please professors to the point of obsequiousness, he thrived not by surpassing his fellow students but by making them look bad. One day, shortly after he had reduced Lily to tears by refusing to give up his extra session in the laser lab so that she could finish a test, Vermont Pete had left his (carefully sealed to prevent unauthorized reading) notebook in the graduate coffee bar. The next day it was found - opened and melted into the wall next to one of the paintings in the Dark Gallery, the graduate school's art exhibition space, so that all could read. Nobody ever claimed responsibility, although there were offers of rewards should the person step forward. 

"He really needed to be stopped," Alex said. "Or at least put in his place for an afternoon." 

"I'm not arguing, nor am I complaining about your chivalrous efforts," Lily said with a frown. "But we're getting away from things."

"We're not, actually," Alex contradicted, moving uncomfortably as he leaned against the ladder to the loft bed at a point where he shouldn't have. "All this stuff is part of who I am and now you know about how I do it. Nothing's changed in that respect except for the fact that you know."

"Everything's changed, Alex," she told him, taking her hair out of her ponytail and re-doing it. "For all of the nice, convenient things like instant boiling water and microwave popcorn without the microwave, there's something else..." 

How did she try to explain all of her fears? Of him being hunted by Sentinels - or even the police? Of her being caught up in it. How much at risk was she? Was her family in danger - she had heard of the Friends of Humanity and those other groups chasing down and hurting friends and family of mutants. What of a future that neither of them dared speak about to the other... what if they did end up getting married? What if they had mutant children?

"My past is my past," he said, going back into the kitchen. Lily could hear him opening up the freezer. "And while that's going to take a helluva lot of explaining to do - especially my family - anything that comes out of the woodwork to mess that up is going to be as much of a surprise to me as it is to you. Alright, so maybe my family is not the best example to start with... But seriously. I can't promise you nothing is ever going to happen to me either because I'm a mutant or because I'm Havok. But I can promise you that I don't plan on taking any of it lying down. Or putting anyone else at risk because of it..."

"But you do," she said. "Every time you turn into Havok and run off into danger."

"That's no different from a fireman or a policeman," Alex contradicted, leaning over the kitchen counter to see her face. "Or a soldier. Or a _sailor_. You don't begrudge your father for his career. And you wouldn't turn down a guy just because he had a dangerous job."

"But you don't have a dangerous job," she replied. "You are a grad student..."

"Like I said, I'm always Havok. Always have been." He sighed, admitting the inadequacy of the statement. "Come on, I defrosted the meat sauce you made last week."

They ate without fanfare, piling up the newspapers that Alex's tiny table were always covered with on the floor and trying not to spill the soda bottle. Alex put his shirt back on to eat and asked Lily about her lab sections with the undergrads and for a few minutes, it was almost normal. 

The phone rang and Alex looked at the clock on the microwave and went to answer it. 

"Hello?... You drew the short straw, huh?... Yeah. It's apartment six. Don't double-park when you get here, they ticket like mad... All right."

"That was Sam," Alex said as he sat back down. 

"He used the phone. He's not a telepath?" Lily had to ask. It wasn't said viciously and Alex smiled. 

"No, Sam's occasionally perceptive, but he can't argue for shit," he replied with a snort. "All telepaths are good arguers. They like to gloat how they can win fair and square."

"Ah," Lily replied, her good mood dulled a little by Alex's easy comfort with the very notion of telepathy. She found the idea of someone being able to both see in and control her mind frightening in the extreme. 

"Sam flies," Alex said after Lily had put down her glass. 

She stared at him. "Flies."

"Not very elegantly, but yeah," Alex confirmed. "You'll love him. He's a true Southern gentleman. I didn't get along with him too well at first - back when he was heading up X-Force and I was leading X-Factor. He's too damn much like Cable sometimes and I'm too much like Cyke. It's like weird family-issues-by-proxy. But now that we're not butting heads, he's kind of grown on me."

"At the risk of being gauche," Lily said thoughtfully. "Is it okay to ask which one he is? Is it even okay for me to know all this stuff?"

"Well, Sam's nom de guerre is Cannonball," Alex replied. "As for you knowing... that's what this whole trip is going to be about. I hate having to lie about everything and I hate having to keep my friends hidden away like that and I want you to be able to meet people who have known me for longer than a few academic terms. I've had to keep a lot of my life hidden from everyone here - some of it was me trying to fit in and that was the wrong reason. But some of it is basic necessity. If everyone knows I'm Havok, then the next time Scott and Jean come down here, they're going to be under scrutiny. And you don't have to look too hard at Havok's brother who just happens to have to wear red sunglasses all the time and see Cyclops."

"Scott is _Cyclops_?" Lily sputtered, coughing hard enough for Alex to pound her back gently. "I... never made the connection."

"That's the whole point of secret identities," Alex told her wryly. 

"Yeah, but..." Scott Summers. Quiet, content to let his wife do the talking for both of them, and yet never appearing weak or dominated. But still... Cyclops? Maybe it was the glasses - claimed as a sign of frailty - that were so effective at throwing off suspicion.

"Don't feel bad," Alex told her cheerfully. "You should have seen _my_ reaction to finding out Scott was Cyclops. I handled that only slightly better than finding out that I was a mutant... Actually, no. I've handled almost everything better than finding out that I was a mutant. I'll let Scott tell you that story. He enjoys getting to tell the part where I squealed like a little girl and ran into the desert to hide. Everyone likes that story." 

The buzzer rang and Alex got up. Lily put her fork down and waited. 

While Alex had made it sound like he and Sam had known each other for years and years, Sam looked to be her age. At most. His face looked a few years younger and his eyes much, much older. He, too, moved with a barely perceptible gingerness that Lily took to mean that he had been in the same fight in Idaho that Alex had been in. 

Alex made introductions and Sam was graciously polite and charming. Alex looked around for something that could be used as a third chair - the kitchen table not quite designed for even two - and Sam ended up perching on the counter. 

"You hungry? We have more," Alex gestured at the stovetop. 

"I don't wanna put you out," Sam replied in his thick drawl, shaking his head. "Poor strugglin' grad student and all."

"If you were going to be putting me out," Alex retorted with a scowl that was purely for show as he walked over to the cabinet and took out a bowl, "I wouldn't have asked you. Besides, I don't want to have leftovers - I don't know when we're getting back."

"Some of us have to be on campus Monday morning," Lily pointed out, wiping her mouth. She and Alex had gotten past the need to eat with restaurant manners in front of each other and Lily felt a little self-conscious in front of Sam. 

"I know," Alex said as he emptied most of the remaining pasta into the bowl and dumped the rest on his own plate. "But before then..."

Sam was hungry - he finished eating at the same time as Alex and Lily did. The two of them made small talk and rinsed off the dishes as Alex ran around the studio picking up things he'd need for the weekend. 

Lily thought Alex was right - Sam was genial and warm despite her obvious unease. 

"Jean said you were going somewhere for the weekend," Alex called out from where he was digging through the pile of papers on his desk. "You going up to Snow Valley?"

"Cumberland," Sam replied as he handed Lily another wet plate. 

"My family is in Kentucky, except for my sister," he explained to her. "She's up in Massachusetts learning how to use her powers."

Lily tried to cover her surprise, although she supposed it shouldn't be a surprise that siblings should both be mutants. Or even that they should both be mutant heroes. "Are all of your siblings mutants?"

"Thankfully, no," Sam replied with a sigh of relief. "Ma couldn't handle it. Just me and Paige, although there are a couple who are too young to tell without getting tested."

"The Guthries are the opposite of the Summerses," Alex said as he rejoined them in the kitchen. "Sam's little sister is eager to join the X-Men. Unlike me, who has to get dragged back kicking and screaming."

"I don't think Paige understands what's involved," Sam sighed, wiping his hands on the dishtowel Lily offered him. "She thinks graduatin' to the X-Men is like makin' the big leagues and it's not. The achievement she should be striving for is controlling her abilities, not getting the chance to throw herself in harm's way all the time. Not like the kids don't do that enough as it is."

Lily must have shown her reaction on her face, because Alex stopped what he was doing and winced. 

"We're freaking you out again, aren't we?" he asked with concern. 

Lily shook her head. "I'm not freaking out," she told him. And it was the truth. "I'm just sort of numb now. It's like jumping into a cold lake. The water's not gotten any warmer, but I've lost the ability to tell."

"It's all a bit much at first," Sam told her comfortingly, sounding not at all patronizing. "I didn't know what was happenin' to me right when I manifested. And then I fell in with a bad crowd and ended up doing a lot of things I'm still not proud of doin'. I got a real good lesson in how a little misdirection can bring out the worst in all of us, I guess. Hardest thing for me is fightin' someone who's just like I was - someone who wants to do the right thing and then gets to believin' in the wrong stuff. Not exactly exclusive to being mutants and all, but..."

"But if we don't get going now, you're not going to get to Kentucky until very late and we're going to hit the worst of the weekend warrior traffic on the way to Westchester," Alex interrupted. "Do you want to leave from here or do you want us to find you a more secluded launching pad? You could go off from the Cleveland Tower..."

Lily just shook her head and Alex put a hand on her shoulder comfortingly. 

"It's dark enough already," Sam said with a shrug. "You got a key to your roof?"

"Yeah," Alex replied. "Do you want to call your mom and let her know you're leaving?"

"Cell phone," Sam said, patting one of the pockets on his leather jacket. "I'll call her once I get close. That way she won't start tryin' to convince me that it's too late to fly. She knows what I do for a livin' and she still gets antsy about me flyin' in the dark."

Lily wondered what sort of woman Mrs. Guthrie must be like to have not one, but two children be mutants strong enough to join one of the superhero teams. And then to still fuss over them like a normal mother. Well, it's not as if she knew what a normal mother would be anyway after living with her own. 

Five minutes later, the trio headed up to the roof. Lily would have been happy to wait for Alex, but he thought she should see Sam in flight. 

Sam was as gracious in departing as he had been in arriving and promised Lily a flight once she had gotten accustomed to everything. Alex had muttered something about him putting his hands all over his girlfriend and Lily hadn't understood until Sam had taken off straight up into the air with a muted roar. There was too much acceleration for him to simply hold someone's hand in flight. 

Alex was right - watching Sam disappear into the darkening sky was riveting. It was like watching someone with a rocket pack, except there was no rocket. The engineer part of her brain - apparently unaffected by everything that had gone on this evening - was calculating acceleration and velocity and wondering how well he could change direction and what his turning radius must be.

"You should have seen him when he first came to the X-Men," Alex said after she finally turned to him. "Ororo says he was like a bottle rocket - he could go really fast in straight lines, but couldn't turn and couldn't stop unless he crashed into something. He's lucky he's mostly invulnerable while he's blasting or else he'd be a heap of broken bones. Or else they would have found out about the External thing much sooner, I guess."

"External thing?" Lily repeated with dread. "I don't want to know, do I?"

"Well, you'd find out on your own eventually," Alex replied with a shrug. "Sam's a year older than you are and he's not going to age a day."

"Oh." There was nothing else really to be said to that. 

 "You ready to go? We'll stop by your place and pick up stuff and then head up."

Lily took a deep breath and nodded. 

* * *

"Well, Alice, you ready to jump down the rabbit hole?" Alex asked as he offered his hand to help her out of the car. She'd been quiet on the ride up and, after a few attempts to draw her out, Alex had turned the radio on so that the silence wouldn't grow oppressive. 

Lily gave him what would have been a flat stare had she not been so nervous, but took his hand, grabbing her backpack with her other one. 

Jean was waiting with the door open. Alex kissed her cheek in greeting and stepped back to present Lily. He was under no impression that things had gone well or that they'd gotten through the worst of it already, but he couldn't walk around on eggshells, holding his breath until she let him know where things stood. So he tried to be as normal as possible without trivializing things, to show her that there was enough of the Alex she'd always known still in him to make the rest seem familiar.

"Welcome, Lily," Jean said with a warm smile. "I'm glad you're here."

"Thanks," she replied haltingly.  

"Don't worry," Alex reassured her. "Everyone's housebroken."

"I..."

"Alex, why don't you go take yours and Lily's things upstairs," Jean told him, eyebrow raised in that 'don't you dare think of saying no' expression that all of the X-Men knew not to cross. "I opened up your room, so it shouldn't be too stuffy in there."

"Yes ma'am," Alex mumbled, kissing Lily quickly before disappearing. "Be back in a minute."

He went past Jean and inside, noticing immediately that there were fewer people than normal milling around the main floor - there was no noise coming from either the kitchen or the direction of the entertainment room. Jean had probably warned everyone. His suspicions were confirmed once he reached the second floor and passed by Bobby's open door. 

"Hey, 'Lex," Bobby called, then appeared in the doorway. "Jean's got Lily?"

Alex nodded as he pushed open his door and turned on the light, dropping his and Lily's bags on the bed. All considering, it was maybe presumptuous to assume that she'd be willing to share a bed or a room with him, but it would be up to her to make that choice. 

"How'd she take things so far?"

Alex sighed heavily and sat on the bed. "She agreed to come up here, so it didn't go as badly as it could have," he said. "She's pissed and she's confused and she's scared and..."

"And you're scared," Bobby said. It wasn't really a question and Bobby wasn't making a joke. 

"I'm terrified," Alex admitted. He and Bobby had been through too much to have much distance on the personal feelings front. "She's... I _love_ her. And now that I know I can't be the person she thinks I am, the fact that maybe she can't love the person I actually am scares the crap out of me."

"Look," Bobby began, leaning against the doorframe. "You're mercurial, you're impulsive, you internalize like only a Summers can, you hate doing dishes, and, according to Logan, you are a world-class blanket hog. If Lily can put up with you in spite of all that, then I don't think that you being Havok is going to be that much of a problem."

"Do you ever really think about what goes in to being an X-Man?" Alex asked. "About all the times we've been kidnapped, held captive, had our minds messed with, been cloned or impersonated or otherwise taken over, _died_... There's a lot there, Bobby. And not all of it happened when we were on duty. It's not just as easy as saying that I've just got a really interesting hobby."

"Don't focus on that right now," Bobby told him. "Focus on the fact that when you're not missing, presumed dead, under the influence of evil powers, being impersonated or otherwise harassed by your evil twin from an alternate dimension, or just plain pissy because Sinister likes your brother better, you - be you Alex or Havok - are still you. And Lily, whatever chemicals she may have been exposed to in pursuit of her engineering degree, still likes you."

"She likes Alex," he corrected with a sigh. "And I can't pretend anymore that being Havok isn't a part of who I am. You know that Star Trek episode with the good Kirk and the evil Kirk? That's how I feel. There's Alex and there's Havok and they can't really exist without the other. And there's nothing I can do but try to be me and wait for her..."

"Well, I suppose you could have Jean fiddle with her head or something," Bobby agreed. He gave Alex a smile and a shrug. "But that would be defeating the purpose."

"Yeah," Alex agreed, appreciating Bobby's graceful exit from his exposed emotional fray. He stood up and moved towards the door. "I better go back downstairs. I don't want to look like more of a coward than I am."

"Buck up, private," Bobby said as Alex passed him by, patting him on the shoulder. "You've got all of us doing our best to meddle and help you two work things out. She might end up with you just out of pity."

"Thanks," Alex said wryly. But Bobby knew that he really meant it. 

"Those who can, do," Bobby said as he headed back towards his room. "Those who can't, teach."

When Alex came downstairs, Lily and Jean were in the kitchen with full teacups chatting quietly. Lily looked relieved to see him, but not in a way that indicated she was scared of Jean. 

"So, when do we drag out the pictures of me with the silly headdress?" he asked with slightly forced cheer as he sat down next to Lily. He was a little surprised when Jean got up to get him tea - this was normally something she did telekinetically - but understood that it was in deference to Lily's unease. 

"We'll spend some time tomorrow embarrassing you," Jean assured him. "I think Lily's had enough shocks to her system today."

"Oh, she's seen me look like an idiot often enough," Alex assured her, smiling at Lily, who gave him a slight smile. "That's not a surprise anymore... So. Now that I had the brilliant idea of coming up here, what are we going to do?"

"We are going to do nothing," Jean told him, sipping at her tea. "This isn't an indoctrination session. You've come up to visit with your family and friends, not to recruit Lily to the cause."

"Although if Kitty's determined to stay in Scotland," Scott said from the kitchen doorway as he wiped his hands on his jeans, "We could always use someone with engineering skills. For a bunch of superheroes, we're remarkably inept with any mechanical process more complicated than plugging in and turning on and off... That's a joke, 'Lex, stop looking at me like that."

"Where were you?" Alex asked instead. "And where did Jean scare everyone else? Bobby's up in his room and I haven't seen anyone."

Scott sat down next to his wife. "I was working on the insulation in the boathouse," he said with a frown. "That's why we're staying here in the main house. It was a warm fall, so we didn't realize how cold the place got... and then we've been too busy to do much about it once winter hit."

Alex nodded. This would have been the first winter that Scott and Jean would have had an opportunity to live in the boathouse - incidents, rebuildings, adventures, attempts to live in Alaska, and various other distractions had interfered. 

"As for everyone else," Jean began with a shrug. "I let them know that you two were coming up, but suggested that nobody change their plans and that they'd all see you at some point over the weekend. Rogue and Logan are off at Harry's, Betsy's with Warren down in the city, Hank and Cecilia are downstairs doing Lord knows what in the lab, you know where Sam is, Dana's visiting her brother, and Ororo and Bishop are off investigating something Cerebro reported. That should be everyone." She smiled apologetically at Lily. "Mutant superhero alter egos or not, we can be a pretty overwhelming group when we're all in the same place at once."

"Ah," Lily replied expressively. Alex recognized her 'I really don't want to know, do I?' tone of voice. 

"But... Are you sure that's all you told them?" He asked Jean skeptically. "Bobby normally doesn't hide in his room. Or is this a new development?"

"Bobby's got some top-secret plan going," Scott answered with a frown. "I think it involves using Hank's birthday as a means of pursuing the estimable Dr. Reyes, but he won't tell me anything. But he cackles evilly at random intervals, so I'm not worried."

"At least until Cecilia blows him into the next room," Alex snorted, then turned to Lily to explain. "Cecilia Reyes is a resident here under protest. She kind of got bombed out of her old life and she's here until she can set up a new one. Won't do the code-name, or the skimpy outfit, or any of it. Smartest one here." 

Alex didn't know Cecilia well, but what he did know, he respected immensely. It took great courage to keep declining the admittedly seductive offers the X-Men could extend. But Cecilia had a talent and a will to help the world at large - especially the sorts of people she had left behind in the Bronx - and that couldn't be accomplished in the sub-basements at the mansion. Even with the sorts of toys available down there...

Lily excused herself to find the bathroom, asking directions from Jean. 

"So how's it going?" Alex asked after Jean returned. 

"She's not here for a cure, Alex," Scott replied sourly. 

"She's a little scared, a lot overwhelmed, and she wants to see what there is to see before she comes to any sort of decision," Jean added. "She wants to believe in you, Alex. But you rattled her faith badly."

Alex nodded. This he knew, even before getting reminded by Jean and Bobby. It was more that he was so nervous that he didn't trust his own instincts anymore. 

"You should take her down to the basement tomorrow," Scott suggested. "Show her some of the toys."

"It's okay to do that?"

"Why wouldn't it be?" Scott asked with a shrug, stealing a sip from Jean's tea and making a face at the lack of sugar. 

There was a commotion right outside the kitchen entrance and, after a thud and a muffled grumble, the door that led from the garage opened up and Logan appeared. 

Alex had time for a quick nod of greeting before he could see Lily in his peripheral vision. She had returned through the other doorway and froze for a moment before moving as quickly as could be considered polite back to her seat next to Alex. Even dressed in casual clothes - plaid shirt and jeans -- Logan could look a little daunting to strangers, Alex admitted. Not daunting enough to prevent a few bar brawls and such, but still...

"You lose someone?" Scott asked as Logan nodded a greeting to Alex and smiled at Lily and headed towards the fridge. 

"Rogue flew straight up to her room," he replied, coming away from the refrigerator with an apple. "Got chili on her blouse."

Jean half-closed her eyes for a moment (presumably, Alex thought, saying something to Rogue) and then opened them, reclaiming her teacup from Scott, who was surreptitiously reaching for the sugar bowl. "Don't even think about it, buster."

"You up for a session tomorrow?" Logan asked Alex as he came to the table and sat down in the last empty chair. "Supposed to bash Bishop around a little, but if he's not back yet, I don't think he's gonna be up to it tomorrow."

Alex half-whined, but then nodded. Might as well - it would keep Scott in a good mood and he hadn't done any drilling in a while. "We have a very advanced playpen downstairs," he told Lily. 

She gave him the same 'I'm overwhelmed' smile she'd been giving him all night and he offered her a wry one of apology in return. 

They sat around for a bit, catching up on news and gossip, trying to keep Lily from feeling too left out even as it was clear that she felt too much so already. Eventually, they put their cups in the dishwasher and headed off to their respective rooms. Lily didn't hesitate to follow Alex into his and for that he was grateful. 

After the last time the mansion had been razed, they had rebuilt the residence floors so that each room came with a bathroom en suite. Alex had never really cared too much before, but was thankful for it tonight as he didn't think Lily was up for wandering the halls looking for the loo. 

"Intellectually," Lily began after they had taken care of their ablutions and were lying in bed, "I suppose I always knew that the X-Men had lives apart from fighting. I just don't think I expected them to be so... pedestrian. In a good way, I mean. Fussing over insulation and going for beers in local dives and remembering to buy toilet paper."

"That's part of what I wanted you to see," Alex replied, reaching over to turn off the bedside lamp. "That even when my day job was being Havok, I was always still Alex. Just not as often as I wanted to be."

"Which turned out to be too much for Havok," Lily added. 

"I guess, but now I'm starting to feel like I've got a split personality, so let's stop referring to me in the third person, okay?" Alex pleaded. 

"Deal."

Alex wanted to say more, wanted to at least know what Lily was thinking -- beyond the obvious shock that went along with finding out that her boyfriend could melt steel with a thought and was wanted by the authorities in seventeen countries. But she had rolled on to her side - Lily's body language for either being half-asleep or being unwilling to carry on further conversation. Alex was sure it was the latter and fell asleep hoping that she'd be in a better frame of mind in the morning. 

* * *

"I'm going slightly mad," Bobby sang quietly as he stood, perplexed, in front of the open refrigerator. "I'm going slightly maaad. It finally happened, it finally happened, oh yes..."

"Quick, someone find Drake the apple juice 'fore he finishes the chorus!" Rogue cried out from where she was sitting pouring her cereal.

"It's over here," Lily offered gesturing with her toast. 

Morning had come and with it, a little bit of calmness and acceptance. There was still a part of Lily that very much wanted to finish singing the song Bobby had been interrupted in the middle of, but it was now joined by a part of her that realized that what she was experiencing was just a different version of being part of a military family. A very strange military, absolutely, but not so very different that she didn't recognize elements from her own childhood. 

Alex was not here, having kissed her cheek and headed off after Logan to 'go get my brains beat in' and begging the short man not to do too much damage lest Lily be forced to fend for herself this weekend. But, to her own surprise, Lily had gotten past her most acute terror of being alone in this strange crowd. 

"Great thanks, my lady," Bobby said and bowed as he reached for the juice, frosting up his glass before filling it. 

Lily tried not to stare. She didn't know where her own ideas that mutant powers should be used sparingly and only in non-frivolous situations came from and why it hadn't gone away after watching Alex reheat dinner in his hands the previous night. The problem was with her, not with everyone else leading their own lives in their own home. 

Nonetheless, Bobby gave her an apologetic look once he realized she was watching. 

Once the particularities were dispensed with, Lily realized that breakfast in the X-Mansion was a lot like breakfast in the suite she had lived in as a junior in college. People came and went and goofed off and irritated each other and lived their lives within the constraints of having to share a roof. The X-Men were a paramilitary organization, but they had personalities away from the spandex that had nothing to do with their day jobs. Just like every other professional warrior. In this private haven, there was no military discipline, none of the formal diffidence that always marked the X-Men when they made public appearances or were forced to interact with the media. They were very human, as curious about her as she was about them. None of them, apparently, thought much of Alex's skills with women. 

"Hey, Lily," Scott called as he poked his head into the kitchen. "Grab your coffee and come with me."

Curious, she crammed the rest of her toast into her mouth and did so, mumbling through a full mouth an apology for accidentally kicking one leg of Rogue's chair. 

"This is our Bat-cave," Scott said as she followed him down a staircase she didn't remember having seen a door to the previous evening. "We have to rebuild the mansion every few years, but the sub-levels have pretty much stayed intact."

Part of Lily wondered why everyone was being so open, why being Alex's girlfriend suddenly gave her a high security clearance. She knew that with a couple of resident telepaths, there was nothing to lose by telling her things - they could always wipe her mind should she and Alex come to a parting of the ways - but despite that (terrifying) thought, Lily was intrigued. 

"I'll show you the toy chest later, but right now, I think you should see this," Scott went on, putting his palm up against some sort of scanner until a door slid open and they passed into what looked to be a control booth. Lily passed by the scanner - it looked far sleeker than the only other fingerprint recognition device she had ever come into contact with. "Below us is the Danger Room, our virtual reality training area... without the VR goggles."

Lily put her cup down on a coaster clearly marked for such purposes and looked down. It was a bombed-out street corner, rubble piled high all around and the street lamp twisted and fallen. Standing on top of a pile of rubble was Wolverine, claws extended as he looked to be fighting a giant blond caveman-sort that Lily knew she should recognize as one of the mutant bad guys. Across the street, another bad guy popped up and aimed a _harpoon_ at Wolverine. But before Harpoon's toss could do any damage, it was incinerated in a blast of plasma and Alex - Havok - appeared, running down the block towards the other three with his right arm extended. 

Lily stared. It was Alex, but not Alex. The outfit was much more than a costume, the change more profound than anything he could have picked up for Halloween. He wore a look of determined concentration that differed subtly from the look he'd get when he was, say, reading German. His very carriage seemed different. Much less laid back, much more authoritative. None of the goofy, slightly reserved demeanor that Lily knew was anywhere to be seen. This wasn't a game; this was business. And Alex was a professional. 

Nonetheless, the battle looked to be patently unfair. There were five of the bad guys versus just the two X-Men and it wasn't an even match-up. Havok (Lily could see how Alex could so easily speak as being two separate people) melted some of the rubble around one of their opponent's feet, but another opponent came over and banged the ground with her fist and the obstruction crumbled away as if an earthquake had shaken it loose. 

"It would be very easy for Havok and Wolverine to just kill the Marauders and end the program," Scott said from where he, too, was looking down. He was holding his coffee in one hand and while the pose might have been mistaken for being relaxed, Lily was a sailor's daughter and knew better.  "But the X-Men don't kill and not killing is a lot harder. That's why we practice. It's much easier when you're shooting to kill and not to wound."

Lily nodded absently. This was all very familiar to the dictums of the military - to train to such a level that the minimum effort produced the greatest effect. No soldier went into the field to kill and only the best soldiers could keep those promises.

The fight raged on, with Havok bringing down buildings and warping steel girders to hold opponents and Wolverine engaging in a brutal hand-to-hand fight with the man Lily could now identify (once she had heard 'Marauders') as Sabretooth that ended in a draw before moving on to help Havok put the rest away.

Eventually, the program ended and the scenario melted away, leaving the two exhausted and bloodied men standing in an empty room. 

"Well done, guys," Scott said into the microphone, putting his coffee down as he leaned forward. 

Wolverine pulled off his facemask to reveal a wild-eyed Logan and Alex - and he was now Alex again, despite the scratched forehead and torn uniform - whimpered loudly. Logan muttered something that Alex snickered at before saluting the control booth and following the smaller man out of view.  

"He's never sure what to think," Scott said as he sat down in one of the chairs, gesturing for Lily to do the same. "He's got a sense of responsibility to defend those who would be the victims of some lunatic's evil scheme and he knows he's good at it. But at the same time he's sure he deserves a chance at a normal life... and then he feels guilty and selfish for wanting that. And he feels bad that the rest of us seem to be content, more or less, to let this -" Scott gestured around them "-- be our lives. And I'm the worst at it - never really giving civilian life the chance it deserves, running back here at the first sign of trouble - and so much of his confusion and indecision comes from me.

"I…." Scott trailed off. "I don't want to make it sound like I'm putting pressure on you, Lily, because I'm not. But the fact is that you're good for him. You help him find a balance between any sort of obligation he might have to me or to the X-Men or to our cause and the obligation he definitely has to himself."

Lily knew she was blushing. "Thanks, I think."

"It's a compliment," Scott assured her with a self-effacing lopsided smile. "He's my little brother. I want him to be happy and being with you makes him deliriously so." 

Lily nodded and apparently Scott thought the issue over. "Why don't I show you some of our best gadgets now while Alex is whining to Cecilia about his cuts and bruises?" he asked and switched her attention the console, with its impressive array of knobs, levers, and meters. It looked like an electronics lab that had been designed by the Jetsons and when Lily said so, Scott laughed darkly. 

Scott stayed with her and explained each of the functions - letting her set off a few explosions in the room below in the course of things - until Alex returned. Actually, Lily hadn't immediately noticed that Alex had returned - she was too busy playing with a laser sequencer that outclassed anything in Princeton's labs by light years and only looked up when Scott started laughing. 

"What?"

"Nothing," Alex assured her with a wave and a smile. "I was just lamenting that now that you've seen what sort of toys are down here, I'll never get you to leave."


	3. February 2002 - October 2002

"So where were you this weekend?" Orly asked as Lily sat down. Mondays at two was their designated catching-up time, even if they had seen each other during the week. Orly was a friend from undergrad - they had met at freshmen orientation, the only two girls in their group of incoming engineers - and they had gone on to graduate school together. They were at the opposite ends of the spectrum with Lily studying theoretical fluid flow and Orly worked on artificial limbs - it was a personal mission for Orly; she had been born missing her right arm below the elbow - and so the two did not cross paths academically any more. Hence the Monday meetings.

"Alex dragged me off to visit his brother and his wife," Lily said as she ripped open the package of Hostess fruit pies, offering one to Orly just to make her squirm. It was her preferred junk food, a dirty little secret that Alex found alternately ridiculous (Lily eschewing almost every other form of junk food) and endearing and that he had been known to support through anonymous deposits of packages of the rarely-found-in-Wawa's blueberry kind in her department mailbox. 

"Oooh," Orly murmured knowingly. "Getting serious, are we? How did it go?"

"It was... interesting," Lily said hesitantly, taking a tiny bite of the apple pie square and licking the flakes of icing off of her finger. If _that_ wasn't the understatement of the decade. "It's like it's a whole new Alex when you put him in his natural environment."

Seeing Alex as Havok and seeing Havok in action up close - and not through the filter of the evening news - had been revelatory. After finally coming upstairs from the Danger Room session, Lily had described the technology that Scott had said was Shi'ar to Jean as 'alien.' The joke had been explained, but Lily had been too curious to let the utter strangeness of aliens get in the way of her exploration. Compared to some of the Earth-spawned mutants, aliens were really not such a leap. Alex had joked that Lily was all for invasion so long as she got to play with their toys. He might not be wrong - the X-Men had sequencers, scanners, and a processing unit that had the ability to 'learn' at a much steeper curve than she had even thought possible with current advances and that was just the tip of their toybox.

"So what's Alex's family like?" Orly sipped at her coffee and grimaced, then opened the top and stirred the sugar she had dumped at the bottom. 

On Sunday, Jean had dug out a photo album and Rogue (who apparently had no other name), Logan, and Ororo had had a great time telling stories about Alex from their time in Australia. While Lily had remembered the incident in Dallas, Alex really hadn't wanted to talk about what had come after Australia and she had let it lie. 

"I've met Scott and Jean before," Lily finally replied with an ease she didn't quite feel. "But a lot of their and Alex's friends were around and I met them." 

"Alex had quite a life before grad school," she added somewhat lamely because Orly was waiting for an elaboration.

"Well, yeah," Orly retorted with a snort at the obvious comment. "You don't take a decade off between college and grad school and not be allowed to talk about it if you've just worked on Wall Street."

"I don't buy the secret agent stuff," Lily replied. "There were a ton of civilians who worked with my Dad in the Navy who were sworn to secrecy and all they did was simple stuff, no covert assassinations or anything like that."

"Yeah, I know," Orly admitted. "But the secret agent and Delta Force stuff is so much cooler. I mean, 'boyfriend who was off in some Central American country working for the military testing for ground water' or 'boyfriend who spent ten years delivering pizzas before he realized he needed a life and couldn't do anything practical with a geology degree'?"

"I don't know," Lily said, making a face. "I'm kind of seeing the advantages of pizza boy..."

"He told you what he did, didn't he?" Orly put down her coffee and leaned forward. "Don't worry, I won't ask what it is... but are you okay with it?"

"I will be," Lily replied. And, for the first time, having to say it aloud to someone who didn't know what was going on, she actually believed it to be true. If not right away. "It's just a lot. And it has much farther reaching implications than I thought it would."

By the end of the weekend, Lily hadn't quite accepted everything - she was still angry at Alex, still in numb surprise at everything she'd seen and heard. But she did believe - and she allowed Alex to realize - that they would probably get through this okay. With time and absolutely no more secrets and lies. 

"Well, look, no matter what he did in his past, he's still Alex, the guy for whom you gave up bowling," Orly offered. The Princeton chapter of the Society of Women Engineers sponsored weekly bowling events and Lily hadn't been since she had started dated Alex. 

"Orly, I _hated_ bowling."

"I know," Orly replied cheerfully, picking up her coffee. "But I liked having you along. You're so bad at it that you were more of a spectacle than the one-armed chick."

They moved on to other topics from there - Big Pete's new girlfriend ("the _undergrad_ "), the news that the just-opened sushi place was already closing because nobody wanted to migrate from their space at the bar at Tsukasa, and the SWE's Very Belated Valentine's Day Semiformal that Lily begged Orly not to mention to Alex and knew that she would anyway. 

From there, Lily's day moved on with almost disturbing predictability. She spent the rest of the day in the Superflow lab and got home in time to eat cereal for dinner and ignore a message on her answering machine from her mother. She and Alex got together for dinner the following night, made love for the first time since The Truth was spoken, and still nothing seemed different. 

In the weeks and months that followed, Lily let herself be sunk slowly into the warm bath of normalcy, grudgingly - and privately - accepting that perhaps Alex was right and things could be something close to the same as they had been. During spring break, they packed up some work and rented a car and drove south. They went camping in Virginia and Alex was able to start the campfire and keep the tent warm despite the driving rain and Lily realized that she was slowly getting used to the idea of being with a mutant. 

And then came the May Day Massacres. 

Ten bodies were found in the apse of a Catholic church in Oparilla, Nebraska. They were draped in a shroud that had "will He take them?" written on it. The victims were all missing persons from Nebraska and the five surrounding states. Six of the ten were under the age of eighteen. Only nine of the ten were found to have actually been mutants - one of them, a fourteen-year-old boy, was merely suffering from a melanin imbalance. But it had been enough. 

Upon hearing the story from one of the techs, Lily had rushed from the lab to find Alex sitting stunned on his couch, watching the news. He had already called Westchester and there was nothing he could do - Psylocke and Wolverine had been dispatched to aid the baffled (and not completely unsympathetic to the killers) local sheriff. She let him vent his feelings of impotence, his rage, and his pain until all that was left were tears. As she held him as he sobbed in her lap, Lily was left to wonder at her own resurfacing fears. She and Alex were progressing towards a permanent relationship - they were looking for an apartment to share for the next academic year; in a decade or so, one of those dead children could be theirs. She knew Alex had the same thoughts, had caught half-whispered mutterings that when strung together echoed hers. 

Even within the hermetically sealed world of a university campus, the killings affected the atmosphere. Alex's profound distress lasted longer than most others', but Lily, newly sensitized to how those around her viewed mutants, was mildly heartened by the outpouring of regret. Vermont Pete was even subdued. The quietude lasted until finals, at which point the stress of exams and then the exultation of commencement took over. 

A branch of the Friends of Humanity based outside of Cedar Rapids was eventually found to be harboring the three killers, all of whom would stand trial without the chance of the death penalty. The X-Men asked to attend the funeral services of the ten and were rebuffed - harshly - in four of the cases. And life went on. Three weeks after the last of the ten victims was buried in Kansas, the state legislature of Louisiana voted overwhelmingly to require that all mutants within its parishes register. This was despite the protests of the ACLU and various other groups, all of which pointed out that a central database only encouraged the kinds of killings that had happened up north. The protests were covered in the news until the next big event and eventually life went on, at Princeton and everywhere else.

* * *

"No."

"What 'no'? Why not? It's only $3.99."

"Alex!"

"It's a classic!"

"'It Will Steal Your Body And Damn Your Soul'?"

"You never watched bad B horror movies growing up?"

"Of course I did. But I never had the urge to buy them later on. The Brain from Planet Arous? It sounds like a porno title...This doesn't have any sex in it, does it?"

"It's from 1957. They weren't allowed to _say_ sex back then."

"But they were able to say 'Arous'."

"But they had to spell it wrong. See?"

"I don't think they had closed-captioning back then. Spelling doesn't count."

"So you're not going to let me buy it, are you?"

"You can buy it, it's your cash. But we're moving in together in six weeks and that's not coming with you."

"Spoilsport...Oh! Mars Needs Women! We _have_ to get this one."

"Alex."

* * *

"Lily, this is my son Nathan," Scott came up to her half-dragging an immense silver-haired man whom Lily had at first thought was Scott and Alex's erstwhile father. The occasion for the trip up to Westchester was a surprise thirtieth birthday party for Alex and Lily was pleased to see that it had come as a true shock. Now, however, it looked like it was going to be her turn to be set up for repeated surprises. "Nate, this is Alex's significant other, Lily."

Lily hoped she was smiling politely and that her still-new mental shields (courtesy of an afternoon with Jean in Central Park) were holding as she held out her hand to shake. It had been four months since her initial visit to the X-Mansion and the initial parade of superheroes-as-civilians and Lily had been sure that she was almost getting a handle on it. Until this.

"Pleased to meet you," Nathan said, smiling wryly. He looked as though his mind was elsewhere. "It's lucky Alex's party coincided with a necessary trip to the area or else I'm sure Scott would have kept me hidden. He's afraid of my social skills."

"Or lack thereof," Scott muttered.

"Actually, I'm surprised they mentioned me at all to you," Nathan went on, seemingly warming to the challenge of needling his father. 

"I knew there was a Nathan, but..." Lily was proud of being able to keep her surprise mostly out of her voice. In the time since she had first come to Westchester, she had made an effort to learn more about the X-Men and their descendant teams. Although anyone who followed the news - let alone the daughter of a career military man - would know without having to ask that Nathan was better known to the public as Cable. Lily had long since learned that anything involving the Summers clan was bound to be closer to mind-blowing than mundane.

"We told her you were on a class trip," Scott admitted, scratching the back of his head and grinning goofily at Lily. "That you were in fact building up a worldwide network to support the takedown of Apocalypse kind of got lost in the whole 'Welcome to the X-Men' routine."

Nathan had made a vague noise sounding something close to disbelief, but was cut off from any further comment by the arrival of a striking woman. 

"And this is Domino," Scott said and gestured. "Nathan's... partner."

Introductions were made and Lily raised her eyebrows as Domino seemed to be looking her over appraisingly. 

"You look entirely too sane to be involved with a Summers," Domino finally said, pursing her lips as if she was sure she was overlooking something. 

Lily smiled. This was hardly the first time someone X-related had questioned her taste in men. "I'm finishing up my doctorate in fluid dynamics," she explained in her best deadpan voice, sounding almost chipper. "Scientific interest and all."

"Just what the world needs," Nathan grunted, "Another person who sees the Summers family as an exclusive strain of lab rat."

Lily, unsure if he was being serious and not wanting to offend, was about to apologize for her joke when she caught a twinkle in Nathan's eye. Something more than a twinkle, actually. More like a golden flash...

"Well, so long as you're getting something useful out of it," Domino replied with grudging approval. She patted Nathan's arm and then gestured behind herself with her head. "If you'll excuse me, I've got an impending father to go tease unmercifully." 

With that, she headed off across the lawn in the direction of Logan, who was deep in conversation with Piotr Rasputin. 

"So you work on fluid mechanics," Nathan began abruptly and Lily actually jumped. He had a very intense manner about him and to have it turned directly on her... "Theoretical or experimental? What aspects?"

"Theoretical. Mostly turbulence and supersonic flow," Lily replied quickly, waiting for the blank stare that always went with any sort of question about her field of interest. "But I've been doing a little side work on optimization and control theory, especially since I'm now living with a walking generator."

"Supersonic flow," Nathan repeated thoughtfully. "Have you done anything on the effects of distortion?"

Scott shook his head and grumbled to himself before turning to walk away. "If you two are going to talk shop," he said, waving his hand vaguely behind him. "I'm going to go help Rogue fight with the potato salad."

Lily smiled apologetically at Scott and then turned her attention back to Nathan, who apparently knew quite a bit about fluid dynamics even if he wasn't in the field. It was refreshing to be able to carry on a conversation about her topic of academic interest without any of the usual academic crap overshadowing it. Nobody to impress with an eye towards a future job, not having to intentionally obscure facts to avoid spoiling your own research, not having to explain every single technical term and shorthand... 

"All right, Nathan," Alex called over to them as he approached, waving his arms dramatically. "Stop right there. She's not going to join your merry band of secret soldiers."

"I wasn't trying to recruit her," Nathan replied, frowning as if he were hurt at the implication. "We were just having a conversation."

"For forty minutes," Alex retorted with a disbelieving snort. "And you were so far into it that you didn't even notice Domino and Logan's extended - and quite funny, by the way - mockery of you two."

"What merry band of secret soldiers?" Lily asked, confused for a moment before realizing. It had been remarkably easy to forget that she was talking to Cable, arguably the most dangerous of anyone affiliated with any of the X-teams. Even when the X-Men were on good terms with the government, Cable was still the most outlawed of the outlaws, the most terrifying of the supposed terrorists. She mentally chastised herself for forgetting that in her enthusiasm.

"Oh, man," Alex sighed with shake of his head. He ran his fingers through his hair and Lily absently remembered to start nagging him to get a haircut. "We don't have the time today to get into all of my darling nephew's recent and intended activities. I promise I'll try, or at least I'll get Scott and Jean to try. But not today."

Nathan looked over Alex's shoulder and grumbled something that Lily was sure wasn't in English. 

"Well, don't shoot the messenger," Alex told him blithely, pointing in the direction of Logan and Domino. "Go after Boris and Natasha over there."

"I think I will," Nathan muttered darkly. "Excuse me."

Lily watched him go and then hit Alex none-too-gently in the forearm. "I can't believe you just 'let it slip your mind' about Nathan," she hissed. "And if you're not going to tell me what you were referring to about his 'merry band of secret soldiers', then I do expect you to give me a hint as to why he's older than Scott."

Alex whimpered and rubbed his arm. "Umm... remember me saying something oblique about family issues when you wanted to rent the director's cut of _T2_?"

"Vaguely," Lily answered slowly, realizing that this was going to be one of those moments when she really wished she hadn't asked. 

"Well," Alex sighed, then drew himself up as if he were preparing to take a body blow. "Okay. Short version: Scott and his first wife Maddie have baby Christopher. Much chaos ensues, culminating in Dallas, Australia, and New York City and somewhere along the line Christopher gets renamed Nathan, a portal to Limbo opens and we nearly get enslaved by demons, and Scott hooks back up with Jean. Infant Nathan gets infected with deadly disease from the future and Scott and Jean send him to the future to be cured and he comes back a few years later as Cable, except he doesn't tell anyone who he is and proceeds to make a whole lot of enemies among the X-Men. Jean and Scott get married, disappear into the future for a few weeks to raise baby Nathan for a dozen years and kill Apocalypse before getting sent back here. Scott spends the time after that trying to build some sort of paternal bond with Nathan, who's really not having any of it... Are you regretting asking yet?"

"Only if the long version is much more interesting," Lily replied with a laugh. There was nothing else she could do but laugh - how else was she supposed to react to this sort of stuff? Why did anything involving the Summers family have to be eight kinds of complicated?

Alex frowned at her. "The long version would put the both of us directly into therapy and involves pretty much everyone you see here today."

"So I suspect," Lily admitted with a sage nod that was spoiled by her smile. "But I'm sure I'd have a helluva time on the way to the loony bin."

"Only because you didn't live through it," Alex said lightly, although Lily could see that there was true pain behind it and she sobered. "But it's over now and I can focus on introducing to you the less completely crazy aspects of my past... Lorna!"

Lily turned around to see whom Alex was calling to. She knew about Lorna - Alex's onetime flame, then teammate, then friend - but had never seen her and while she had spoken on the phone to Lorna, Lily hadn't had the courage to ask Alex which X-person she really was. Lily was as comfortable as she assumed she could be at the idea of Alex staying friends with an ex-girlfriend - it seemed petty to be jealous of a relationship that had been over without a spark of renewal for most of a decade. 

A tall green-haired woman Lily knew as Polaris approached. Lorna was _Polaris_?

"Ah, at last we meet face to face," Lorna, who was indeed Polaris, said with a broad smile as she held out her hand. Lily shook it. "You need a better picture in your wallet, 'Lex."

"Yeah, well," Alex said and shrugged. "If a certain someone wasn't camera shy, I'd have one."

"Stop taking pictures of me eating," Lily told him with no pity, even as she was privately flattered that Alex did carry a picture. He had never said that he did. 

Lorna laughed heartily and Lily could see a bit of Rogue in her - there was something almost masculine about the way she carried herself. "So you two are on the home stretch, I hear. In more ways than one."

"Apparently," Lily said with a pleasant smile. She didn't especially want to get into the whole 'when are you two getting married' discussion that seemed to crop up every once in a while when Alex was out of earshot. "We're starting to dust off our résumés and all that."

"My first time applying for a job since college," Alex added with a nod. "Weird, isn't it? I'm thirty years old and I've never been on a job interview."

"Well, you know that if you two are interested in anything in the oh-so-financially-rewarding field of government work," Lorna offered with a smile.  

"Uh-uh," Alex cut her off with a wave of his hands. "No. Not going back to X-Factor. I miss you and the gang, Lorna, but you can tell Val that hell will freeze over before I go back to that. And I don't think Bobby takes on government contracts, so you can't get him to try."

"Well, what about you, Lily," Lorna persisted, smiling all the while. Lily was sure that she was serious, just as she was sure that she'd take rejection easily. 

"Un-unh," Lily replied with a rueful snort. "I know exactly what sort of benefits package comes with government work."

"So you two are going to get lazy working nine hours a week in some cushy tenured professorial position instead of saving the world," Lorna said with an exaggerated sniff before breaking into a wicked cackle. "Good for you. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart."

Before the conversation could get much further, Ororo came out with an appropriately-candled cake and made everyone sing Happy Birthday. 

* * *

"Umm... Alex?"

"Yes?"

"Would you still love me if I dropped out of school to drive a Zamboni at the Meadowlands?"

"Probably, although I might get annoyed at all of the explaining I'd have to do."

"Okay. Just checking."

"Is this an imminent decision or do I have time to prepare remarks for when your father calls and demands to talk to me?"

"If I don't figure out how this border transfer works, it's going to be imminent."

"'Cuz, you know, I get really nervous every time your father calls me."

"He doesn't call you. He calls me and you're obsessed with answering the phone before I do."

"I'm not obsessed with answering the phone before you do because you don't answer the phone. I just don't see the same advantages to letting the answering machine screen calls that you do."

"You haven't spoken to my mother often enough."

"You're forgetting that conversation we had about my geniture."

"That's right. Mercury's slightly in retrograde for you. Explains so much."

"You know, next time your father calls, I'm going to tell him you're here and I'm going to let him give you the free milk and a cow speech again."

"Considering you're the one getting the free milk, I'd think you'd have qualms about letting him convince me to change my ways."

"Oh, shit."

"You realized I'm right?"

"No, I realized we're out of whole milk."

* * *

It was the middle of the day, but Penn Station was a zoo courtesy of seemingly hundreds of children. There was some sort of Sesame Street skating show playing at Madison Square Garden above them and it being Saturday, the concourse was thick with screeching children and overwhelmed parents. Alex grinned as the parades of happy children ran by, but didn't say anything because he knew the appreciation didn't carry over. 

"And people wonder why I don't want to spawn," Lily muttered on cue as they stood against a pillar watching the Arrivals board. 

"Nobody wonders," Alex replied wryly. "They all just wish you'd reconsider." He counted himself as one of them, but saying 'we' instead of 'they' made it a loaded sentence when you were living with the other person. 

Lily was distressingly proud to say that she had no maternal instinct. Alex, like everyone else in Lily's life, knew that that wasn't really the case. It was more a matter of her utter fear of not doing a better job than her she viewed her own mother's attempt. That, and since she had no real experience with taking care of kids, hardly unique considering she was an only child, she didn't have any sort of feel that she could do just fine. Of course, the Mom thing was by far the bigger issue and, on that front, Alex didn't know what to think. He had never met Starshine Beck (he knew she was calling herself Onamara Something-or-other these days, but Lily refused to keep up with the name changes) and if Lily had her way, he probably never would. All he knew was that Lily's mother was the child of two card-carrying radicals and had surpassed them at almost every point. How she had ended up marrying Lily's father, a Navy officer, was a story he hadn't yet gotten from Lily, although he did know that the marriage hadn't lasted very long. 'My father's a squid and my mother's a nut,' was Lily's stock line.

"I think it might have been faster for him to drive," Alex said as they watched the board letters flick over from "ON TIME" to "DELAYED 15 MINUTES" for almost every train.

"Dad's not big on long drives," Lily replied, pressing herself against the stainless steel pillar as a posse of sticky-fingered children careened past. "At least not on land."

One of the quirks of his relationship with Lily that had initially intrigued him was that both of them were reluctant to talk about their childhoods. But it wasn't intriguing anymore. Alex had kept quiet out of security reasons, but Lily had done so out of a genuine wish to forget. After her parents' divorce, she had lived with her mother for a few years that she would not discuss, until Starshine had wanted to join a commune. Alex knew that by the time she was twelve, Lily was living with her paternal grandparents next to the naval base off the coast of Washington where her father was attached and that that had lasted until her grandparents' health had started to fade and Starshine was back living in a place where everyone wore clothes and nobody grew hemp. Lily had been reluctantly returned to San Francisco, but had worked hard enough to graduate high school two years early and had fled across the country to MIT. Alex, fractured childhood in his own past, couldn't even imagine the frequent and personal strife that must have gone on in that family.

"I'm going to find a Duane Reade to get a soda," Alex said as he checked the board once again. "Do you want anything?"

"Fruit Mentos," Lily replied, making a face as Alex made a face. "What? They're the only things that don't melt in my purse in the summer."

"They're vile and disgusting and gross and icky," he replied as he pushed off of the pillar. "And they stick to your teeth."

"This from someone who snarfed a whole box of Milk Duds at the movies the other week," Lily retorted.

"Milk Duds are classic," Alex protested as he walked away. "Mentos are just gooey Velamints on steroids."

He found the drugstore easily enough - the Amtrak boards were at the center of a circle of stores - and settled on an iced tea, remembering to check the candy aisle for the Mentos but refusing to get the multi-pack. He drank the iced tea as soon as he was outside the store, dropping the empty glass bottle into the recycling can.

As he made his way back to Lily with her candy, he saw her waving to someone and he looked around. The full service uniform - complete with topcoat folded over one arm - made it easy to figure out whom. Lily and her father had just finished their embrace when Alex walked up. 

"Dad," Lily said with a proud smile. "This is Alex. Alex, this is my father."

While Lily only registered as part-Asian if you knew to look for it - Alex hadn't spent all that time in Hawaii to not be able to see such things - Captain Daniel Beck looked very much like his mother was Korean. He also looked very much like his father had been a hard-ass Army drill instructor, although that might be because he was looking at the man who was living in sin with his daughter. Captain Beck was of a height with Alex, although not as broad across the shoulders. He had the unforgiving posture of a career officer who was never completely off-duty and a small, thin scar on his right cheek that Alex knew had come from an on-board accident during Desert Storm. 

Alex switched the bag to his left hand, swallowed hard, smiled, and held out his hand. He didn't miss the flash of recognition that passed across Captain Beck's face before the handshake was returned. A firm handshake, one suitable for a man sizing up the suitor of his one and only child. 

"At last we meet," Captain Beck said with a nod. 

"Putting a name to a face," Alex murmured in agreement. It was an incredibly awkward moment, he realized. Well, he had known it would be - Captain Beck had not been entirely thrilled to find out that his daughter was moving in with a man without a ring on her finger. Four months later, there was still no ring on her finger, although there was one buried in his file cabinet and Alex had hoped to bring it up as a point of discussion with him at some point today. 

"All right, let's eat," Lily, not oblivious to the tension, announced, clapping her hands eagerly and gesturing with her head towards the escalator. "How was the ride up?"

"Acela Express was worth it," Captain Beck replied, letting Lily loop her arm around his as they walked. "DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and then here."

Alex nodded from his spot one step below them on the escalator. "We're going to come out on the wrong side," he told Lily. 

"I know," she said, letting go of her father's arm to put on her hat and gloves. Alex, of course, needed neither. "But it was that or walk through the entirety of Penn Station and I'm not sure I could handle another swarm of children hopped up on spun sugar."

They exited the building on to the taxi drive and then out on to 31st Street, heading east towards Seventh Avenue. They made small talk - Alex and Lily giving the oversimplified versions of the 'highlights' of their recent conferences (his slide projector had gone rogue and he'd had to do an interpretive dance version of a riverbed analysis; she had nearly decapitated U Chicago's newest hire after she'd overheard him suggesting that she'd gotten a place on the conference roster because her relationship to the great Ray Dagley was something more than just advisor-advisee) and Captain Beck discussing his similarly embarrassing adventures with Virginia's traffic lights. It had been a while since he had transferred back to Whitbey Island to be closer to his ailing mother, but he had spent the previous week at a conference in Norfolk, where he had previously been based for many years. 

Little Korea was only two long blocks from Penn Station. Lily had taken Alex here before. She liked to confuse the waiters - she might look like a Westerner, but she spoke 'Kitchen Korean' from living with her grandmother. But they didn't go to the restaurant they usually went to, instead Captain Beck had his own preferred spot and soon the three were ensconced in a quiet booth with a half-dozen small white bowls of pickles and appetizers being placed before them and then the trays of marinated meat to be grilled. 

Alex had initially been skeptical of any restaurant where you had to cook your own dinner, but soon realized the inherent amusement in the affair and could enjoy watching Lily shoo both him and her father away from the inlaid table grill with her chopsticks as she expertly flipped the thin strips of meat before the overly solicitous waitress could come and help. He busied himself with the delicate process of taking off only the top leaf of the tightly coiled pile of pickled cabbage with his chopsticks, absently holding up a lettuce leaf for Lily to plunk meat onto. 

All throughout the meal, Alex realized with relief, the conversation gradually warmed. He and Captain Beck were no longer talking through Lily and were asking and speaking up without having to be prompted by name. Lily had laughed delightedly when the two men had realized that they had both gotten food poisoning at the same Alexandria steakhouse. 

When the bowls of sweet rice drink and the plate of fruit were brought out, Lily excused herself and Alex knew that this was his opportunity. 

"Tell me something, Alex," Captain Beck began before he could say anything. "When Lily changes the subject when I ask about what you did before graduate school, is it because she doesn't know or because she doesn't want me to know?"

Alex took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He had known this was coming. "The latter," he said. "She's known for a while now."

Captain Beck nodded once, apparently - Alex hoped - a sign that it had been an acceptable answer. 

"I was Comms officer on the _Andrew Jackson_ during the cleanup of Genosha," the Captain went on and it was Alex's turn to nod. The _Jackson_ had been one of the two aircraft carriers assigned by the Navy to support humanitarian operations there and Alex, as Havok, had spent quite a bit of time visiting the hospital and processing center set up on its flight deck. 

"Did we meet then?" Alex asked, shifting in his seat to relax his pose, which had gone from casual to Catholic School after Lily had left them. 

"We were never introduced formally," Captain Beck replied with a ghost of a smile. "You were busy and so was I." 

Alex nodded again. "Is this..."

"Going to be a problem?" Captain Beck finished with a raised eyebrow. "I won't lie to you and say that I'm thrilled that my daughter is involved with one of the most wanted men in the world. Yes, I know that you've done a lot of good - I saw some of it personally. But we both know that that doesn't put you - and Lily - in any less danger. Being a mutant - and being around a mutant - is not yet safe."

"I'd die to protect her," Alex told him without pause, leaning forward so that he could express his seriousness without raising his voice. "I'd die before I let anything happen to her. She's aware of the risks, better than you probably know. She understands who I am and what I have done - and what I may have to do - as much as anyone who hasn't been there can. She's okay with most of it, not okay with some of it, and willing to wait for the rest of it..."

"In what capacity?"

"As my wife, if you'll grant us your blessing," Alex replied, a little surprised at the direct way the matter had been asked and answered. 

Captain Beck sat back in his seat. "You ask this knowing that Lily will do what she wants no matter what," he said. 

"I don't plan on forcing her to choose between us, sir," Alex replied. 

"And I don't plan on it either," Captain Beck replied, smiling at Alex for the first time that evening. "I have your promise, so you have my blessings. But take care of her, Summers. And take care of yourself. I've seen too many war widows."

"Yes, sir."

The tense tableau was broken by the arrival of the waitress with a teapot and three glasses. Lily followed behind, looking curious. Alex realized that she must have known that the two of them needed a few minutes alone and he smiled at her to indicate that they hadn't spent the time threatening each other. 

After lunch - Captain Beck insisted on paying - the three stopped at a Korean market before Alex said goodbye. He had agreed to go up to Westchester to help Logan set up the nursery for the imminent arrival of the twins. 

Logan was getting frustrated with everyone's attempts to help - the official domestication of the Wolverine was much too intriguing for everyone _not_ to get involved. ("They're treatin' this like I'm a puppy that's finally gotten housebroken," Logan had grumbled on the phone.) Logan was not a man to show how he felt through words. But building a home for his family with his own hands was his own eloquent monologue, one that Sulven could appreciate even if she didn't entirely understand it. Alex understood Logan's frustration with the meddling and he didn't understand how a house full of telepaths - and people who had known Logan for years - couldn't see it that way. Sulven did - Alex had a private suspicion that some of the Askani's worst temper tantrums were aimed to get everyone else away from her family unit - but, well, Sulven wasn't quite like everyone else. So it was up to Alex and the visiting Piotr to help out, even if it meant just sitting around and drinking beer while Logan sanded and sawed.  


	4. January 2003

"Alex!"

Lily had many ways of saying his name, Alex knew. There was the 'I can't believe you're doing that in _public_ ' tone of voice, the 'come here, I want to show you something' one (which sounded very much like her 'come hither' voice, but confusing the two could be troublesome), the 'come save me from this insanity' plea... but among all of the variations, none was more dangerous than this one. 

"All you had to do was clean your crap off half the table," Lily went on from the dining/living room. Alex was in the bedroom, laptop and notebook spread upon the bed, hiding from what he privately referred to as Dark Lily. "That's all you had to do... Alex, are you even listening to me?"

"I got caught up in other stuff," Alex replied loud enough to be heard in the other room as he fiddled with a footnote. "You aren't the only one with a defense committee to kowtow to."

"No, but I'm the only one who's got forty-five graphs to get perfectly right and I'm _not_ the one who can just input all this stuff into the computer first. I lost a week writing that thing for Perotelli and I haven't caught up yet and I can't waste time making room for myself amidst all of your shit." 

Alex dropped his head and sighed. This was going to be one of _those_ afternoons, then. If she didn't stop seething when he brought up his own impending deadlines, then she was going to be like this for hours. Days, even, if whatever she was doing didn't work itself out immediately. 

With both of them on a schedule to defend their dissertations in March, things had gotten progressively more stressed as time marched forth. With their social calendars dropping to nil - after allowing them to skip any and all holiday season celebrations, Scott and Jean had driven down last week and taken them to a local restaurant just so that they'd get outside - the two were left with each other and their stress. And between the cabin fever and the dissertations, they were both losing it. 

Alex knew he had the gift of perspective - the worst that could happen is that his dissertation would take longer than he wanted it to. But it was only a dissertation and if it needed tweaking, then it needed tweaking. It wasn't as bad as, say, waking up a mutant-hating magistrate on Genosha or a Goblin Prince. But as hard as it could sometimes be, he had to remember that Lily didn't have this distance. And there was nothing wrong with not having it - it was an innocence that Alex hoped to preserve for her for as long as he possibly could. 

But Lily's innocence could sometimes only be appreciated in the theoretical. Despite the fact that she held a professional degree and was eminently employable, the doctorate was a do-or-die situation for her and nothing Alex said could convince her otherwise. Saying anything at all tended to get her only more angry - Lily would snap that unlike certain people, she didn't have a job as a mutant superhero waiting for her should the grad school thing not work out - so Alex had learned to keep quiet and to pack up and move to the library for a few hours if silence wasn't good enough. 

Silence was what was coming from the main room and Alex was just about to hope that it was a sign that the storm had passed when there was a crash of heavy book hitting floor and a wordless scream of frustration. Alex saved his text, powered down the laptop, and got up off the bed, groaning slightly. He had not bothered to support his chest with a pillow and his back was cranky from being hyper-extended for most of the last five hours. 

Without saying anything, he went to the doorway and looked out. Lily was standing amidst a small blizzard of papers (it was all scrap paper, Alex knew. Anything important was always, always clipped together and usually bound in plastic protective covers) with the very chunky MEDR by her left foot. She had her hands in her hair and was pulling tightly and when Alex cleared his throat gently, she turned to him with an almost wild-eyed expression. 

"It's not working," she whispered. "I've done the calculation the long way, the short way, on the computer... fuck, I even tried it in spherical coordinates. And it's not working. I've spent three years on the same damned project and it's not going to work. I've wasted three years on a theory that isn't going to pan out. I've been tilting at fucking windmills. Barking up the wrong fucking tree. Making an _ass_ of myself by insisting that I could force the Navier-Stokes equations to get around the viscous effects and to do what I wanted and I can't make it work."

"If I ask you if you're sure that you used the right starting numbers," Alex began slowly, "Are you going to tear my head off again?" 

Lily had done both of those things a few times already - the former a simple mistake that nonetheless could be warped by her into further proof that no university not run by lobotomized lab rats would grant her a degree. The latter was just another manifestation of her stress.

"Oh, I checked _that_ a couple of dozen times," Lily laughed darkly, pointing with one bare foot at a pile of papers on the floor near the couch. "I even redid the last five calculations that led up to this one. It's not the math. It's the premise. I'm fucked."

"You're not fucked," Alex replied with the assurance of someone who's had to repeat this sentiment a few times. Which he had. More than a few times. "I know this with absolute certainty. You know why? Because you can barely tolerate sleeping in the same bed as me and you sure as hell aren't leaving the apartment for some illicit nooky."

Lily stared at him crossly, clearly not pleased that he wasn't taking her attempts at self-mortification seriously. 

"You're not about to explode your academic career," Alex went on, unaffected. "You're not about to be the poster child for Mechanical Engineering Hubris. And you're not doomed to the fate of popping out of cakes in a bikini at bachelor parties for a living. Or gas-jockeying. Or driving a Zamboni at Shreveport Mudbugs home games. In case you've forgotten, you were recruited for a job before your defense date was even set. You had a position set up..."

"That's completely dependent on me finishing up this academic year," Lily cut him off harshly. "City College only wanted me then because they thought I'd have a degree in hand by the time I started. Which I won't. Because I'm going to have to go back over three years of research to figure out where the hell I went wrong. And either I'm going to have to re-do everything that came after the mistake or I'm going to have to start all over because nobody will take a dissertation that has a summary paragraph that says: 'You know that distortion effect on supersonic flow that nobody thought you could do? Well, I spent three years proving that they're right.'"

"Lily," Alex sighed. "You just got finished writing up a section of a paper that your undergraduate advisor begged you to write. Perotelli has got who-knows-how-many of his own grad students and he asked you. He wouldn't have done that if he thought you were a lunatic. And do you honestly thing Dagley has spent the last three years setting you up for failure? Do you honestly think that he has nothing better to do with his time than torture his advisees? The man has a chateau in the Loire Valley and would like more free time to spend working on his vineyard. He wouldn't waste his time like that."

"It's not a waste of time," Lily laughed morbidly, dropping heavily on to the one seat on the couch not covered in papers. "It's not a waste of time if you can have someone else do all the work on proving the impossibility of this particular effect. Because if they fail, then it's not tarnishing _your_ reputation. Nobody cares if your advisee implodes."

Alex sighed and ran his hands over his face. "All right. If we're now on to the paranoid phase, then it's time to do something else. Go get your shoes on. We're going to the supermarket."

"What?" Lily squawked. "I can't go out now. Just because your paper's flowing like the Hudson River doesn't mean the rest of us can just take off and..."

"And not eat?" Alex asked sharply. "In case you haven't realized, Lily, you haven't been out of this apartment in four days. And four days ago, you went to the lab for nine hours. It's time you spent an hour thinking about Frosted Flakes versus Froot Loops and left the Gaussians to Gauss. Isaac Newton ate, too. Come on."

"I can't go anywhere until I figure out what the hell I did wrong," Lily replied heatedly. "If I don't find my mistake, I'll have the rest of my life to do nothing but contemplate Froot Loops."

"Well you're not exactly being productive right now, are you?" Alex retorted, finally losing his patience. He pushed himself off the doorjamb he had been leaning against.

"That's because I'm wasting time arguing with you," Lily said angrily. 

"So now I'm a waste of your time?" Alex asked, knowing he was letting her push his buttons and starting not to care. 

"At the moment, yeah," she replied, standing up to reach for the MEDR. "This isn't a hobby for me, Alex. This is my life."

"So which is it," Alex growled over his shoulder as he stormed back into the bedroom and yanked open his sock drawer. "Am I just the slumming superhero looking for a good time girl or am I just something for you to kill time with until you really have to get some work done? Why can't I be doing this for the same reasons you are? Why can't I be as serious about my studies as you are just because I'm not freaking out and pissing all over anyone who comes my way? More to the point, at what point in the dissertation process did I stop being 'Alex' to you? When did I only become 'Havok'?" 

He cursed loudly as he grabbed the power supply - his hands were so hot that he had left fingerprints in the plastic. Angrily willing himself to cool down, he reached for his backpack and then closed his laptop and tossed it in along with his notebook, coiling up the adapter and putting it in the outside pocket. 

"I'll be back later," he said shortly as he passed through the living room, put on his sneakers and grabbed his keys and jacket. He really didn't want to put it on - the insulated jacket would have his sweat-soaked in seconds as wound-up as he was - but it was barely above freezing outside and he had to keep up appearances. 

The corner of the library where Alex liked to work was quiet - it was around the call numbers for math textbooks and it wasn't a high-traffic area. He plugged in his computer, propped up his notebook on the calculus textbook some undergrad had left on the cubby shelf, and went back to his section on the efficacy of various kinds of ion-based dating tests in actual field conditions. He nearly jumped out of his skin when books were dropped down near his elbow. 

"So, what's a cute guy like you doing in a dump like this?" Ji-Won asked, schooling her features to their most innocent. She was carrying four volumes of _Annals of Science_ and had Hello Kitty notepaper sticking out of what were presumably the relevant pages. 

"If I stay home, I'd have to tremble in fear," Alex replied with a frown. He checked the clock on the corner of his laptop screen and was surprised to note that three hours had passed. "Shit. I wanted to go to Waldbaums before it closed."

"Lily's freaking out again?" Ji-Won asked sympathetically. She was only working on her proposal, so while Ji-Won understood the craziness that went along with the final death throes, she was able to maintain a certain distance from it. "And I have my car with me, so I can drive you over to the Pathmark in the mall if you want. It's open 24/7."

"Let's see," Alex made a great show of pondering. "Is having something in the house to eat besides kimchi and frozen peas worth a ride in the Little Yellow Neon of Doom?"

"It is _not_ my fault that my car is a fender-bender magnet," Ji-Won protested. "I had a spotless driving record before this car."

"Didn't you have something like three headlight replacements before the Neon?"

"Dude, I'm a Korean from Flushing," Ji-Won replied, wagging her finger at him. "Three busted headlights _is_ a spotless driving record. So. Wanna go buy me some Spam?"

Alex looked at his watch and considered that was already eight-thirty. "Actually, do you want to get something to eat before we hit the store? I haven't eaten since breakfast."

"Because all you have in the house is frozen peas and kimchi?" Ji-Won asked with a snort. She took off her coat and dropped it and her backpack on the chair next to Alex. "Let me photocopy this stuff and you're on. I'll be back in a few." 

Alex had finished re-drafting a particularly offensive paragraph by the time Ji-Won had returned. She stole a pencil to write down the citations on the first pages and pulled out a Pochacco folder to stow them. 

"'He's the hip pup with a cool attitude'," Ji-Won told him seriously as she caught him staring at the vaguely dog-like caricature. 

"He's also naked from the waist down," Alex replied, tilting his head to see if any of the various renderings had the pup with pants. "Why does he need a shirt if he doesn't need pants?"

"Because he's 'the cool K-9'," Ji-Won told him, pointing a dainty fingertip at the text before she put the folder back.

"I give up," Alex laughed and turned off his booted-down computer. 

"I saw Valeri over by the microfilm room," Ji-Won said as she shrugged on her peacoat. "Do you want to drag him along to dinner?"

"Sure, why not?" Alex replied as he put away his things. "I don't see anyone anymore."

Valeri was found talking to Sanjay and the four reunited Geosciences students headed off to Ji-Won's car, talking all the while about the never-quite-dead rumor that the department was going to kill off the paleontology subfield and why were they hiring another specialist in eco-politics when they really needed someone for quantitative analysis. Once they got to the parking lot, Alex and Sanjay went rock-paper-scissors to decide who got the front seat and who got the back - Valeri and Ji-Won were the shortest of the quartet, but Ji-Won was driving - and, after losing with 'paper', Alex took the seat behind Ji-Won. 

"Do you want to stop and see if Lily wants to come?" Ji-Won asked as they exited the campus. "It'll be a tight squeeze and all in the back, but..."

"No," Alex replied with a frown as they drove by the pancake house that used to be a regular event for them and now hadn't been seen in months. "She says she doesn't have time for things like eating and I'm not going to get into two fights with her on the same day on the same subject. I'm torn between starving her into submission and making sure she doesn't actually do herself serious harm."

"Isn't love grand?" Sanjay asked from the front passenger seat. 

"Only when you're not finishing up your dissertation," Valeri replied with a snort. "So, you think you two will last long enough to think about an apartment in Manhattan next year?"

"Primakov," Ji-Won sighed with frustration as she executed a slightly hairy left turn. "Do you have no shame? You're one step above reading the obituaries."

"Don't think I haven't been," Valeri moaned. His sublet was ending at the end of the academic year and Valeri was not about to stoop to returning to campus housing. 

"That would explain why Ms. Park is seemingly operating as your real estate agent," Sanjay quipped as Ji-Won sped through a yellow light. 

"Wanna walk?" Ji-Won snarled. She wasn't angry - in fact, she was the first person to admit that she had earned her reputation as one of Princeton's most dangerous drivers. "Jersey drivers," she muttered as she signaled and then passed a Toyota.

Alex enjoyed the camaraderie in silence. It was the natural course of events that he'd see his cohort less and less as they all advanced towards their degrees and Alex really missed everyone. 

Twenty minutes later, they were all sipping margaritas at The Mexican Place (Princeton and its environs not being replete with restaurants and the Geosciences cohort being made up of a collection of varying accents, the local dining establishments tended to be referred to by their ethnicity and not their names. Which in the case of the Small Chinese Takeout Place was just as well as it seemed to change names every six weeks). Ji-Won, who didn't drink even when she wasn't driving, was especially fond of the virgin peach margaritas and could withstand any amount of ridicule over them. 

Sometime between the guacamole and the entrees the conversation had turned to gossip, as it was prone to do with a group of people who hadn't seen each other in a while. Stephanie and Paul had finally given up the pretense that they weren't an item and were now shacking up; Rob had fallen madly in love with a soil expert at U Penn who was twice his age; and Valeri had sworn off women after his disastrous six-week relationship with 'that woman' from French Lit. Sanjay, as ever, managed to deftly obscure the fact that nobody ever knew anything about his romantic life and Ji-Won had more stories to tell of her grandmother's attempts to fix her up with any and all of the nice Korean boys in Jackson Heights. 

"So," Valeri said, clapping his hands. "That leaves everyone but you, Alex."

"I thought the fact that I'm currently in exile from my home and my girlfriend spoke plenty about my situation," he replied with a frown and reached for his drink.

"Yeah, well," Valeri said and waved his hand dismissively. "But you two are on a deadline. You two are moving out this summer."

"And there's that whole matter of why you dragged me up to Paramus back in October," Ji-Won added. She had been Alex's 'girl voice' when he had picked out the engagement ring that was still sitting underneath old lab reports in the top shelf of his file cabinet. "You're not getting cold feet, are you?"

"No!" Alex protested. "It's more like I'm not getting any chances to do it. We're either writing or fighting these days. I can't even get her to the supermarket, let alone out for a nice romantic dinner so I can pop the question. Everything I say to her these days gets interpreted as either mollifying or patronizing or just plain inconsiderate. She'd probably take a proposal as me admitting that she doesn't have what it takes to be an academic."

Any responses were interrupted by the arrival of dinner and then the topic was changed entirely after Valeri realized that the waiter had misheard 'chicken' and brought him cheese burritos. 

Ji-Won and Alex dropped Sanjay and Valeri back on campus after dinner and drove off to Pathmark and it wasn't until after they had discussed the relative merits of Granny Smith apples that the topic was re-introduced. 

"Speaking as a girl here," she said, holding out a bag for Alex to pick out green peppers. "Don't rule out the fact that Lily's scared of a little more than just her schoolwork."

"What do you mean?" Alex asked as he looked over the lettuce. 

"Valeri's right about the deadline," she explained, putting two cucumbers in the basket that was riding shotgun to Alex's cart. "She knows what's coming up - you two have jobs nearby each other and staying together would be natural. But she can't keep living with you if she doesn't have a commitment. Shacking up once is okay. Twice isn't."

"I'm not commitment-phobic," Alex protested. "Am I?"

"I think you're cautious," Ji-Won replied, tearing off another plastic bag from the roll. "And I think you have a different perspective than she does. You've lived with someone before. She hasn't."

Alex pondered this as he looked over the bags of pre-packaged oranges. Living with Lorna had been different. Neither of them had been thinking of commitment then. Permanence wasn't a goal, was barely a concept they had understood. And in the years since he had lived with Lorna in the desert, Alex had never found any sort of stability even as he had come to understand it. It was part of the reason he and Lorna had never bothered to try their relationship again - even if they didn't know the specifics of it, both of them appreciated that they weren't the same people they had been in those carefree days.

Alex had never known what he wanted - more like he had only known what he didn't want. And it wasn't until Lily that he had finally seen things differently. She represented so much of what he hadn't even realized that he was seeking until its possibility was presented to him. 

"I have to figure out a way to do this, don't I?" He asked as they moved on past the salad dressings and into the dairy section. "I've been waiting for an opportunity to present itself and it hasn't."

"Well, it's all up to you," Ji-Won said as she checked expiration dates on the half-gallon containers of whole milk. 

"Which in girlspeak means yes," Alex snorted. 

The rest of the shopping - and Alex stocked up knowing that there was a car to carry everything back instead of just whatever he and Lily could comfortably stuff into their granny cart - went quickly and there was nobody on the check-out line at eleven-thirty. 

Despite Alex's protests, Ji-Won helped him carry the groceries inside. She didn't come in, however, and they said goodbye at the curb. 

"Thanks," Alex told her, giving the tiny woman as firm a hug as he dared. He always thought he might break her if he wasn't careful. "For everything."

"Hey, if someone in our group of escaped lunatics is going to have a normal relationship," Ji-Won told him seriously, "Then we all have a moral obligation to help. But you're welcome nonetheless."

Lily was asleep when he got in - not a surprise to Alex as he wasn't sure she had actually gone to sleep the previous night. He was half-convinced she changed into her pajama outfit solely to help her remember to take a shower and change clothes. He put away the groceries and hooked up his laptop to the external hard drive and synchronized all of his files he kept on both computers as well as the CD-RW before going to the bathroom and taking care of his ablutions. 

He came back out in his pajama bottoms and carefully rooted through the top drawer of his file cabinet. The ring he had picked out had been with Lily's quirks in mind. She normally didn't wear rings - it was just another thing to take off in labs - and would grumble about the one ring she did like and rarely wore. It was a single-stone sapphire her grandmother had given her and Lily still had the scar on her forehead from where she had accidentally cut herself with it.

As such, Alex had opted for three smaller diamonds instead of one big solitaire. "More aerodynamic," Ji-Won had agreed, although she had pushed him towards the ones that had a rounder, larger middle stone. Putting it in his pajama pocket, Alex went into the kitchen for a glass and filled it with ice cubes and water. Just in case. 

Lily slept like the dead and Alex, for once, was grateful. He put the glass down on his nightstand and looked carefully for his best access to her left hand, which was currently underneath her pillow as she was on her stomach. Climbing gently on to the bed on his side, he felt for it and slowly pulled it into view. Lily didn't even stir. 

Ji-Won had given him major grief for not bringing the sapphire ring with him for sizing purposes and they had had to guesstimate. Alex had known all along that he could re-size the ring by himself, but hadn't wanted to tell Ji-Won that and had put up with her rant instead. The glass of ice water was to cool the metal just in case he actually had to fiddle with the band. 

He didn't. The ring went on easily, but with just enough resistance for Alex to know that it wouldn't slide off. He looked at Lily's hand with approval, but it wasn't until he leaned back on his haunches and looked at her hand in relation to the rest of her that the awe set in. 

This was it. Right where he wanted to be. And there was no taking it back, not that he'd want to. He felt almost giddy. Lightheaded. And while a part of his mind was warning him that when it came to X-Men and especially to Summerses it was getting to the wedding that was the hard part, the rest of him didn't care. He wanted to tell someone, wanted to wake Lily up, wanted to share his elation. But waking Lily up would ruin the effect. If he was going to propose like this, then he couldn't spoil the surprise. So he turned off his bedside light and lay down.

It was a long time before he finally fell asleep. 


	5. January 2003-August 2003

"Alex!"

For a former career superhero, Alex had never been a good morning person. Skrulls could be attacking and he'd still be groggy if he hadn't had his coffee yet. So when he heard his name being called in something close to a terrified voice, about all he was capable of doing was sitting up and blinking dumbly and remembering not to heat up his hands if they were touching the blankets. 

"What the hell is this?" Lily was standing in the doorway to their bedroom, holding up her left hand. The diamonds sparkled in the morning sunshine.

Alex smiled crookedly. "Exactly what you think it is?"

"You know, it's customary for the woman to be conscious when she's proposed to," Lily told him. She was trying to sound stern, but her voice sounded choked. 

"You were busy," Alex replied, hoping it didn't come out waspishly. He rubbed his hair vigorously, knowing it was already standing on end. "I wasn't sure you could fit it into your schedule."

Lily made a noise and Alex wasn't sure if it was a laugh or a sob. "I've been a royal bitch, haven't I?"

"Will you keep the ring on if I say yes?"

"Yeah," Lily whispered and made the same noise again and Alex still wasn't sure what it was because she was smiling, but it really sounded like a sob. 

"So are you going to just stand there all morning?" he asked after it became clear that Lily wasn't going to say anything more.

"Well, I was in the middle of making coffee when I noticed it..."

Alex got out of bed and walked over to Lily. She didn't move, just watched him approach. 

He reached for her left hand and got down on one knee. "Just because you get very cranky when you think I'm making decisions for the both of us without consulting you," he explained with a mock-serious expression as he fiddled with the ring, centering it. "Will you marry me?"

"Yes," she breathed. 

Up close, Alex could see that Lily was, in fact, crying. Crinkling his features in apprehension, he waited until she met his eyes. "Happy tears, right?" he asked, standing up and not letting go of her hand. 

She nodded, biting her lower lip to keep from losing her composure. He reached up with his free hand and wiped away the tears with his thumb before letting his hand drift back to her neck. Dropping her hand, he pulled her close, kissing the lip she had been biting. 

She put her arms around him as he pulled back enough to look down into her eyes. She looked up and smiled at him, a tiny sob escaping. "I love you," she whispered. "Even when I'm being a neurotic bitch from hell."

"See, that's what makes you a perfect addition to the clan," Alex explained as he kissed her again, sliding his hands up the back of her t-shirt. "Men in my family are just programmed to fall in love with neurotic bitches from hell. Occasionally, it's been taken a little too literally, but I'm pretty sure you've just got a temporary case. I'll love you even after you're better, though. I'm supposed to be the well-adjusted one, after all."

"Good to know," Lily replied, pulling him closer. "So, about that coffee..."

"Coffee can wait," Alex muttered, picking Lily up around the waist and heading back for the bed.

* * *

"So?"

"Professor Summers, you're speaking to Professor almost-a-Summers."

"You passed! I knew you would!"

"Well, at least one of us did."

"You're lucky I'm three thousand miles away or I'd be giving you scathing looks right about now."

"You're lucky you're three thousand miles away or I'd be jumping your bones right about now."

"And why is distance a good thing in that case?"

"Fair skin. You bruise easily."

"I'd rather it be you doing the bruising than some of Nur's minions. Only in my family would saying 'We'll celebrate after your defense unless the Apocalypse comes' be a warning and not a promise."

"Don't worry. Saving the world _is_ more important. If extraordinarily ill-timed."

"I'll tell Nur when I see him."

"Do that."

* * *

"So who gets the office?"

"Pardon?" Lily asked as she carried another box from the living room into the kitchen. Today was moving day and several of the X-types were helping out, leaving Lily to the unpacking. Alex having friends with super-strength _definitely_ had its advantages, even if it meant that none of their 'civilian' friends could come over lest they witness the slim southern woman holding one half of a queen-sized brass bed frame under each arm. Rogue had suggested that they bring up the armoires (too big for the elevator) after dark so that she could just fly them up outside instead of having to negotiate the turns of the stairwell. Scott had kept his face perfectly straight when he suggested that the stairs would be a good exercise and it had taken Rogue a few moments to realize that he was kidding.

"You're turning that second bedroom into an office, right?" Bobby Drake asked as he tilted his head to read the writing on the side of the box he was holding. "Bedroom four," he read and stacked the box in the pile of bedroom boxes for the next time Alex emerged from the rear of the apartment. 

The place had been a find - Valeri's find, actually. It was a respectably sized apartment on the seventh floor of a twelve-story pre-War on Manhattan's Upper West Side, available for a song by the executor of a will tied up in probate court. Courtesy of a combination of some obscure New York State laws concerning estate sale taxes and a co-op board determined to raise the prestige of its building in light of the next-door neighbor going condo, the place was selling for well below market value because nobody had been able to get past the fussy board. But the future Mr. and Mrs. Summers, armed with "Worthington, Warren K." on their list of references, qualified.

"We're splitting it for now," Lily replied as she opened up the box on the table. They had a pleasantly comfortable eat-in kitchen (in return for having no dining room and no space whatsoever in the living room to create one) and Piotr had already brought up the oak table and accompanying chairs that had been a gift from her father. Lily had been worried that the table would make the kitchen too cramped, but without the extra leaf that didn't seem to be the case. Sit-down dinner parties were still out, however. "It's still an improvement over the place in Jersey. Now we have two different rooms from which to flee each other instead of just the one."

"Yeah, you're ready for married life," Scott chuckled as he walked past carrying a lamp in each hand. 

"And it's supposed to be an office," Lily added after smirking at Scott's retreating back. "Or a study at any rate. That's why it's got a wooden door by the bedroom and bathroom and a glass panel door into the living room. The apartment was listed as a 'one bedroom with study'. The agent was most emphatic about that point."

Bobby made an expressive face, but said nothing.

There was a yelp and a loud crash from the bedroom and everyone froze, but the sound of Piotr and Alex laughing loudly immediately relieved the tension. 

"Sorry everyone," Piotr said sheepishly as he emerged, dusting off his hands on his jeans. "We had a misunderstanding about the placement of the bed."

"Yeah," Alex chirped from behind him. "On me or not on me."

"On him," Lily said cheerfully and went back into the kitchen to unpack dishes. 

Five hours later, the apartment was almost completely set up and Lily was standing in the middle of her living room completely in awe. "I can't even fathom it," she murmured. With a flick of her wrist, Jean had unpacked boxes of plates and floated the piles of books onto their shelves. Heavy furniture had been shifted effortlessly as everyone had his or her own suggestions for the most space-efficient setup of every room and nobody had broken a sweat because Bobby had kept the place cool even with all of the windows open to the New York City summer heat. All that was left was to put sheets on the bed and milk in the refrigerator. And Alex and Rogue were currently taking care of the latter, or at least investigating where the closest place to do so would be. 

"Just wait until there's a bit of clutter all around and it'll feel like home," Scott assured her from the couch, where he was slumped artlessly with a beer bottle in one hand. 

"And, Alex being Alex," Piotr added from the loveseat, gesturing expansively with his own beer bottle, "That should take about a day and a half."

"Not if I can help it," Lily retorted, sitting down on one of the dining table chairs they had brought into the living room. The living room didn't have much of a view - on to a three-sided airshaft, actually, along with the study and bathroom - but the bedroom had windows facing south and west, which meant downtown and sunsets were easily seen. 

"That's what we need," Scott mused thoughtfully. "A mutant who has the ability to overcome the second law of thermodynamics."

Lily nearly fell off her chair laughing and everyone else just looked at each other in confusion. Lily hadn't spent an awful lot of time with Scott apart from everyone else - such is the way of future brothers-in-law who happen to be leaders of the X-Men - but she had managed to pick up on his rather dry sense of humor. 

There was a heavy thud on the door and Bobby got up to open it. Alex and Rogue entered laden down with shopping bags. "There's a supermarket up on 96th," Alex reported as he headed into the kitchen. "We didn't check Amsterdam, though, so there could be something closer there."

"It's only four blocks," Lily pointed out. The sudden proximity of everything after three years of Princeton - and even, to be truthful, five years in Cambridge - was very exciting. Being ten minutes door-to-door from work via subway (Alex was that far by foot) was all the more so. Couple that with the whole 'buying your first home' exuberance and Lily wasn't sure she wouldn't be able to fly like Rogue if she really tried. 

"I'm still thinking in Princeton terms," Alex replied with a shrug as he dumped a pile of paper on the coffee table in front of Bobby. "Did pick up a few menus, though. In case we want to order out instead of cook. Vietnamese, Chinese, Turkish, a kebab place, Japanese, two pizza places, and Rogue unerringly found the fried chicken place. And that was just between here and the Gristedes."

"Necessities," Rogue explained as she cracked open a beer bottle and tossing one to Alex, who had been reaching for Lily's. "I can smell good fried chicken a block away."

"We'll order out," Jean announced, summoning the pile of menus before Bobby could reach for them. Bobby made a face, but leaned back. 

* * *

"Orly," Lily whined, flopping back on the couch with a groan. This was not how she wanted to spend her day off from teaching. As if Jean - and Dana, the two times she had been up to Westchester recently - wasn't bad enough. 

"What?" Orly asked with frustration. She leaned forward and tapped the open magazine with her index finger. "If you won't do this by yourself, someone else has to force you."

"There's a very good reason I'm not doing this," Lily groused, leaning forward and closing the most recent issues of _Modern Brides_ magazine. "Start with the fact that I've just begun a new job. Go on to the fact that Alex and I haven't so much as set a date. Go on further to the fact that I'm _not_ spending thirteen hundred dollars on a dress I can only wear once. And don't stop until you realize that any wedding that's big enough to involve a thirteen hundred dollar dress will also have to include my mother."

"You're not going to miss out on the wedding of your dreams because of your mother," Orly retorted indignantly. 

"This isn't _my_ dream," Lily cried out in exasperation, standing up and storming into the kitchen. "Why does nobody seem to want to accept the fact that I don't _want_ a big wedding with matching bridesmaids and a three-tiered cake? Did you see how stressed Ahn was before her wedding? I don't want that. I don't want to have to think about seating charts and caterers and music and flowers and picking out a song and all that other crap!" 

Orly pursed her lips and put her hands on her knees (in recognition of the purchase of air conditioners, Orly had waived her usual rule against wearing her prosthesis in hot weather) and stood up, following Lily into the kitchen with the zombie-like walk of the exhausted. Lily snorted; it was Orly's own fault that she insisted on trying to turn Lily into a proper lady. 

"All right," she said with a sigh that hid most of her disappointment. "Fine. Just two questions, then."

"What?" Lily asked suspiciously. Orly had a really annoying habit of springing devastatingly rational reasons on people by couching them as suggestions and innocent questions. 

"First, what does Alex want?" 

"This is the man who proposed to me in my sleep," Lily snorted. "Simple is fine with him." 

Actually, simple was almost a necessity for both of them. It bothered Lily that she couldn't tell Orly, her oldest friend, that Alex was Havok. Orly knew that Alex was a mutant, but it had been decided that 'the rest' of the story should be kept quiet for now. Telling Orly exactly why they couldn't have a big public wedding - even if that was what Lily wanted (and it wasn't) - would have made the entire discussion end quickly. 

"Does this have to do with him not wanting to out himself?" Orly asked thoughtfully and Lily smiled to herself. Orly was eventually going to figure out the whole story on her own anyway. 

"In part," Lily admitted, putting on the kettle for tea. "But he's really and truly not a big pomp and circumstance kind of guy. He's done the big wedding thing already - he's been the best man for his brother and one of his oldest friends got hitched last year." 

If that was what one could call the oaths that Sulven and Logan had made to each other; Logan had taken it very badly when a pregnant Sulven had initially refused to make any sort of promise of commitment and the relief at the oath-taking itself had been disturbingly tangible. 

"All right," Orly said, sitting down at the table. "And the second question is really sort of a promise I want you to make me."

"Oh?"

"No drive-through Elvis in Vegas," Orly said. "And don't tell me that's not a possibility. That's Alex to a T and you're just enough of an iconoclast to go along with it."

Lily snorted back a laugh. Alex _had_ mentioned Elvis in the context of getting married. "Umm... Can I just promise that it won't be both of them? If Alex really has his mind set on one or the other, I'm not going to disappoint him."

"You two are lunatics who deserve each other," Orly muttered, turning around in her chair to face forward. 

A few hours later, well after Orly had left, the phone rang.

"Hi. I'm on my way out. Do we need anything from Zabars or anything?" Alex had that slightly rushed tone that he always had when he was on the phone. Lily thought it was cute, even if she occasionally had to get him to repeat things. 

"No, it's just us," she answered. "Orly wanted to get home before the evening rush. She's got a job interview tomorrow morning. And I got stuff on the way back from running."

"Alright. And we're not good enough for Zabars. I'll see you in ten, then."

Lily had no sooner put down the phone than it rang again. Assuming it was Alex, she answered. "What did you forget?"

"Lily?"

"Scott! I'm sorry. I thought it was Alex," Lily apologized. "What's up?"

"Umm... I'm just calling and checking in... We had an... incident a few hours ago."

Lily furrowed her brow. Scott sounded very shocky. "Is everyone all right? Should I turn on the news or something?"

"It won't be on the news," Scott said in that same distracted voice. "We think it was a dimensional portal..."

"Oh shit," Lily muttered. She and Alex had heard stories about these holes in the space-time continuum opening up for the past year or so. So far, they had been relatively harmless - no lives had been lost, although none of the property that had disappeared into the portals (a parked car, a house, etc.) had ever been returned from wherever - whenever - they had gone. But Scott wouldn't get upset about missing cars or even a missing Blackbird. "Who?"

"Logan, Sulven, Dana, Bishop, Domino, and Nathan," Scott answered. 

"Nathan?" Lily repeated, shocked despite knowing that if anything were to happen to any of the X-Men Nathan should probably be anyone's first guess as to the victim. "I'm sorry... about everyone. Do you guys need anything? Do you want us to come up there or do you just want Alex to call when he gets in?"

There was a chance Scott had already called Alex's cell; he kept it on vibrate at work and frequently missed calls because of it. 

"I... I don't know," Scott admitted. "I think I just wanted to hear a normal voice or something. Everyone's pretty weirded out, even for us. Sam's inconsolable."

"I'd imagine he would be," Lily replied feelingly. "Was he there when it happened?"

"Yeah," Scott answered with a sigh melting into a mildly hysterical chuckle. "Which is good in a really perverse way because otherwise we'd never know what happened at all. One minute they're arguing in the kitchen about something and the next minute..."

 "This happened at the _mansion_?"

"Right in the fucking backyard," Scott replied with a hiss of frustration. 

"The kids," Lily started, realization dawning. "What's happened with the twins?"

"Nothing so far," Scott answered, relieved. "They were down for a nap when it happened, thankfully. One of them is always attached to Logan when they're awake. They've been fed and are being watched by Bobby right now. We're going to have to figure out what to do with them if we can't get their parents home right away."

"Listen. Alex is going to be home in like five minutes. If you want us to come up there, we can catch the 7:07. Or if you guys want to come down here after things have settled down..."

"Can't leave the troops," Scott sighed. "Even if Jean wasn't with Sam and there weren't the babies to think about, I'm supposed to be keeping everyone else level. Great job I'm doing of it, too."

"I'm sure you're doing a helluva job, Scott. You'd never let anyone down if you could help it."

"Thanks," he said with something approaching disappointment. Lily knew it was with himself and nothing more. If past patterns held true - and Lily knew that Scott was very much like Alex in this regard - then this disenchantment with his own actions would soon morph into impotent rage and Lily sincerely hoped Scott found some time for himself before that happened.

As it was, she could hear shouting in the background. "Why don't you go rally the troops for a little bit, then call back here and take out all your frustration on Alex? We'll come up tomorrow evening or Saturday morning so we can help out."

"Sounds like a plan," Scott said. "Thanks, Lily. Really."

"Hey, I'm almost family. Call whenever you want. We'll be up and then Alex is well trained to answer the phone in his sleep."

Lily hung up the phone and sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. Alex wasn't going to take this well - Logan was a great friend of his. How was she going to explain _this_? Either to Alex or to herself. She had spent most of the past year-plus since finding out about Alex's 'other life' trying to build up her suspension of disbelief - she had an engineer's mind (a.k.a. a certain lack of imagination as far as magic and the occult went) and it took effort to not dismiss the more outrageous stories out-of-hand simply because they were illogical, sometimes wildly so. And just when she was sure that she was almost getting a handle on things, something new would pop up and she would realize that she really wasn't as prepared to marry into a family of superheroes as she thought she was. A _time-space portal_. In the backyard. She closed her eyes and shook her head. Best to stop thinking about it now and save any and all freaking out for when Alex got home... which should be any moment. 

Almost on cue, she could hear the sound of keys in the lock. Not finding the strength to get up from where she was sitting by the phone, she waited. 

"Lil?" Alex called after he opened and closed the door and heard no called greeting. 

"In here," she said. 

"What's the matter?" Alex asked as he stuck his head into the kitchen doorway, tossing his backpack towards the couch in the living room and coming into the kitchen to sit down on the chair next to hers. "It was a ten block walk; what happened between then and now?"

"Scott called," Lily explained in a quiet voice. 

Alex took a deep breath and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. "What happened to whom?" he asked, looking down at the floor as if he were bracing for impact. Lily reached out to card her fingers through his hair and he looked up at her with such an expression that her heart broke. 

"A time-space portal opened up in the backyard," Lily began, aiming for dispassionate and knowing she was probably closer to bitter laughter. "Logan, Sulven, Nathan, Domino, Bishop, and Dana got sucked in. Sam saw it happen, apparently."

Alex sighed heavily and dropped his head further and Lily leaned forward to kiss his head. It was a pose of resignation.

"I'm sorry," she said next to his ear, then sat up. 

"It doesn't stop," Alex said after a long moment. He looked up at Lily and she saw his eyes were very bright. "This is why I quit - time-space portals don't open in normal people's backyards. And I didn't want to live my life getting sucked into timestreams and having my friends replaced by evil clones... I don't know why I thought it would hurt less being away from it all..."

"They stopped being teammates," Lily replied, reaching out to touch his face. "They didn't stop being friends. Or relatives."

Nodding, Alex sat up and back, reaching for Lily's hand and holding it between his own. "How was Scott taking it? I know Nathan's Nathan and all, but..."

"He's a little unstrung," Lily admitted. "Sam's disconsolate, the twins are going to be wondering where their parents are soon, and everyone expects him to make it all better. As usual. I told him to call and vent when he needed to."

Alex frowned. "He rarely does. Vent. Not need-to-vent, which he often does."

"I think he will this time," Lily replied. "It's not just teammates - it's his son, Zara and Nick's parents, Sam's girlfriend..."

"We're getting older, I think," Alex mused after a long silence. "We're losing the ability to rebound as well as we used to. Elasticity of youth and all that. The 'X-Men always get better' thing stops being a comfort after a while... Shit. The babies..."

"Well, look," Lily tried to rationalize. "You've got the two Askani among the missing, right? If I were going to get lost in time, I'd want Nathan or Sulven there with me. It's not like they all don't have someone important to come back to."

"That's never mattered before," Alex retorted. "Missing Scott didn't bring Jeannie home any faster."

They said nothing more - each lost in their own thoughts - until Alex finally stood up and went to the refrigerator, opening it up and looking around for something to make for dinner. Scott didn't call until after ten - Alex took the call in the bedroom, Lily was reviewing the following day's lesson plan at her desk - and the two brothers spent the better part of an hour talking quietly. 

"Piotr's coming in tomorrow," Alex said as Lily came in to the bedroom from the bathroom. "He's been pretty down living at Muir for a while now, so the team being short-handed is just as good an excuse as any."

"Scott didn't ask you?" Lily asked as she climbed into bed. 

"No, but I offered," Alex replied, running his hands over his face before getting up off of the bed with a groan. "Scott said that they probably would have been fine even without Piotr helping out and he's pretty determined not to let this disrupt people's lives any more than it already has. Mine included."

"You're his little brother," Lily said, stretching out. "He's allowed to fuss over you."

"I know, I know," Alex muttered with a levity Lily knew he didn't feel as he headed for the bathroom. "I shouldn't complain when I get what I want."

Lily was unsurprised when Alex reached for her after he returned to bed, leaning over her and looking down at her with an expression that was part relief and part remorse - she was familiar with the odd sort of survivor's guilt Alex felt every time something happened to one of his friends or former teammates. Scott had been right when he had said that Alex had never quite forgiven himself for quitting the superhero business. And so Lily had made it her duty to make sure that Alex didn't regret his decision to find his own happiness. Sometimes it was easier than others, but this wasn't one of those times. They made love with a neediness that rarely struck them both, an eagerness to assure the other and reassure themselves that they were there and safe and not going to disappear anytime soon. 


	6. December 2003-April 2004

"Are you comfortable, Kolya?" Piotr Rasputin asked the squirming bundle in his arms. "Are you sure you wouldn't prefer to take your nap, say, in your crib?"

Alex watched as thirteen-month-old Nicholas Logan paused in his attempts to make himself more comfortable as if he were considering the option. Nick seemed to reject the suggestions as he then went back to nestling into the crook of Piotr's arm. Once settled, he fairly radiated satisfaction.

Looking up, Alex caught glances with Piotr and the big Russian pursed his lips in bemusement. 

"Usually it is Zara who is so resistant to incarceration," Piotr explained in a quiet voice, gently brushing fine black hair out of the baby's face. 

Alex snorted. "She's going to be learning a lot about that word once she grows up, I suspect. Her first word should have been 'bail.'" 

Piotr looked hurt for a moment before the corner of his mouth started to quirk upwards.

It had been a long four months since the Disappearance. While the X-Men had been given assurance that the missing sextet were alive and well, they were also told that Wolverine, Sulven, Cable, Domino, Bishop, and Dana wouldn't be returning until some quest had been met. That there were two children left behind without their parents to see their first steps or hear their first words was not a matter of concern to the Askani. 

Privately and only in his most bitter moments, Alex wondered how much Sulven really cared that she was missing all of this. Her initial reaction to the babies had been a rather... utilitarian one and Alex half-suspected that Sulven felt no conflicting emotions about having to put aside her children to accomplish her task. It reminded him vaguely of some story he had once read about Amazons who mated only to further their tribe and had no special bond to their offspring beyond that of one clanmate to another. 

Logan, on the other hand, was going to be devastated. This Alex knew, this they all knew. And while Piotr had made sure that Nick's and Zara's big firsts were recorded on video for their parents to watch upon their return, it wasn't going to be the same. 

While the initial plan had been to make the care of the twins a group effort, it had rather quickly become Piotr's project. Alex and Scott had remarked to each other that while they really shouldn't have been surprised at Piotr's patience and devotion to the tiny terrors, it was still revelatory, in its own way, to see him so utterly at ease in a nurturing mode. Piotr was the same with the children as he was with his friends - gentle, but absolutely unmoving when he was sure he was right. Under his careful eye, despite the house full of guilt-ridden X-Men, the babies were not spoiled - a harder task than it seemed with two infant telepaths, one of whom (Zara) was proving to be nothing short of ruthless in her attempts to manipulate the already-inclined adults in her world. 

If anything, they were settling down a bit. Zara had reluctantly come to terms with the fact that not only could she not bend Piotr to her tiny-but-formidable will, but also that he didn't think much of her attempting to sway anyone else. Nick... Nick was in love. While he'd barely answer to his own name, he'd come running (well, wobbling) if Piotr called for 'Kolya.' Alex wondered if there would be problems when Logan did return - the twins adored Piotr with that sort of unreserved and unconditional love that children normally set aside for their parents.

Nick started to fuss and Alex snapped out of his reverie when he realized Piotr had said something. "Pardon?"

"I asked if you could reach over and grab my sketch pad," Piotr replied, gesturing with his free hand. "Although if you are daydreaming, perhaps you can go take a nap, too."

Alex made a face, but reached for the pad and pencil case and set them up on the table they were sitting at. Piotr picked up a pencil and started to sketch a face. Alex quickly saw that it was his own and made an odd expression. Piotr frowned as Nick laughed. 

"I'm trying to settle him down, not cheer him up," Piotr told him mock-disapprovingly. 

Alex dutifully schooled his features to their most dour. Nick was just as amused. 

"Perhaps I should draw you with horns," Piotr mused, not looking up from his drawing. "Or after Masque has gotten through with you."

"You'd give the kid nightmares," Alex replied cheerfully. 

"Hrmm."

They fell silent as Alex became just as transfixed watching Piotr draw as Nick was. Alex's face was finished, then his body with his arms leaning on the table, then the wall behind him with the edge of the breakfront. Alex honestly didn't know if Piotr drew much anymore - at least before this current extended babysitting project. When they had been in Australia, Piotr had drawn constantly - pictures of the people he loved, the places he missed, the adventures they had been on. And then he had been Peter Nicholas, the artist, and had become a sensation in the SoHo gallery scene. But then came the Shadow King and when that was all over, Piotr had come back to the X-Men with a shroud of sorrow around him and Alex had gone back to X-Factor and they'd been playing catch-up on their friendship ever since. 

Alex hated that he didn't know whether Piotr was really over Kitty or whether he was just saying that he was in order to remove any lingering shadow over his presence in Excalibur and Kitty's impending marriage to Pete Wisdom. He hated that unless Piotr was visiting the States, Alex only spoke to him on holidays and birthdays or after some sort of mutant disaster. He wished that he could talk to Piotr about finally considering his obligation to the world fulfilled and finally doing something for himself - say, by going back to being Peter Nicholas. He wished they had never grown apart. 

Forcing himself to break away from the smooth lines the pencil produced, Alex watched Nick. The tot was utterly fascinated, his eyes riveted to the page even as his eyelids were beginning to droop. By the time Piotr had finished the details on the moldings, Nick's eyes were closed and he was breathing slowly and deeply. 

"Walls," Piotr whispered. "He never makes it past the walls."

Putting down his pencil, Piotr carefully stood up so that Nick wasn't disturbed at all. Alex followed behind as they left the dining room and headed up the back stairs to Piotr's room, which had a direct entrance to the twins' nursery. 

When Sulven had gotten pregnant, a general renovation of one wing of the residence had been undertaken. As a result, there was now a pair of suites - bedroom, bathroom, small second bedroom, and small drawing room - on the top floor. While the twins had their own room in Logan and Sulven's suite, once Piotr had assumed primary care they had moved to the other with him. 

Zara was still asleep in her crib, although Alex noticed that she did stir when they entered. Telepathic children don't need a baby monitor, Jean had told him with an exasperated smile. It had been months before the twins would broadcast their diaper, food, and other needs to _only_ Logan and Sulven. 

Piotr lay Nick down in his crib with typical gentleness, pulling up the blanket after he was sure that Nick wasn't going to awaken. Checking on Zara before he left - Alex noticed her tiny smile as Piotr gently traced a finger down her round cheek - they closed the door and then left Piotr's suite. 

"Children are amazing, are they not?" Piotr asked once they were on their way back downstairs. 

"Yeah," Alex agreed. "High risk, high reward."

Piotr made a face at the analogy, but nodded. "Do you see yourself..."

"Eventually, I hope," Alex replied with a shrug that he knew Piotr was not going to buy as casual. "Lily... she needs a little bit of time to grow accustomed to the idea. Grow interested in the idea, actually."

"She does not want children?" Piotr asked as they headed back to the dining room. "And if I am prying, then do tell me to be quiet."

"Piotr, I've known you for how long?" Alex asked with a snort. "You don't pry. Lily's scared of being a mother. She doesn't think she can do it. I think she can, but my opinion doesn't count here. It's no rush. I can wait."

"At least until you two get married," Piotr said as they reached the dining room. He closed up his sketchpad and put away his pencil set. 

"That would be assumed," Alex replied with a chuckle. 

"And is that happening soon?"

"Sooner than you think."

* * *

"Which end is up?"

"The end where the letters are oriented the right way... give that back."

"But... it's all in Greek! You don't have any vowels, though."

"Alex, give me back my homework, please?"

"You're the teacher. Why are you doing homework?"

"Because someone has to get the right answer when we go over it tomorrow and it might as well be me."

"It's... Are you sure everything's facing the right way?"

"Yes. Now hand it over. I need to recopy that."

"What's wrong with it?"

"I used the wrong derivative to get the starting number."

"How can you tell?"

"Because I got the wrong answer. Don't you have a rock to cuddle somewhere? A fault line to straddle? A crevasse to fall into?"

"They're not nearly as fun as you are."

"That's so not going to get you anywhere if I'm up past midnight doing this."

* * *

"Scott's going to take this badly," Piotr warned.

"That's part of the fun," Alex chirped. Oh, was it ever. 

Orly shook her head, resigned to the operation but still disappointed that Alex hadn't been able to talk Lily into something a bit more formal. 

"I know," Lily told her, patting her shoulder comfortingly. "You're here under protest."

It was a freezing January afternoon in downtown Manhattan, the first business day of 2004. The sun was blindingly bright against the marble government buildings and the quartet sat in front of a large black sculpture that Orly thought was fairly obscene and Alex thought she had a dirty mind for even drawing the connection. 

He pulled out his cell phone. "Hey, Scott... No... Yeah... Listen: you have forty minutes to get Jean and catch the train from Salem Center... Because otherwise you're going to have to find a teleporter or else you'll miss it... Lily and I have a three-thirty appointment with Justice Haller... Why do you think?... Of course I'm serious... No, Scott, nobody's having a baby... Because we don't want to. Because between engagement and wedding things happen and we figure this way we'll get around whatever crappy luck you seem to have inherited. People disappear. Aliens invade... No, Dad doesn't count... Yes, this is what Lily wants, too. Do you want to ask her?... Well, get your ass in gear... No. Tell everyone later... Because I don't want this turning into a production... Scott, now you've got thirty-five minutes... Yeah. We'll meet you out front. Tell Jean to bring her camera."

He hung up and rubbed at his ear vigorously. "I didn't think Scott knew those words."

Lily and Piotr exchanged glances and rolled their eyes. 

"Why don't we go to lunch?" Orly suggested, making a face at Alex. "I know a great little place on Lafayette right off Canal."

The walk was only five minutes and the Excellent Dumpling House lived up to its name. Piotr had minor trouble slipping in to his seat at one of the tightly packed tables, but once the bamboo racks of steamed dumplings started to appear, all was forgotten. An hour-plus later, they trekked back down to City Hall, stopping first at a Chinese sweet shop so Orly could pick up haw flakes and then at a vegetable stand so that Alex could investigate the mysterious-looking fruits and finally at a florist so Lily could pick out a small bunch of red tulips. ("My wedding, my bouquet," she told a protesting Orly.) If they hadn't been dressed as they were, it would have looked like any other gathering of friends hanging out downtown. Which had been Alex and Lily's plan exactly. 

What hadn't necessarily been part of the plan was how giddy Alex felt at what he'd only talked about - out loud and to himself - as a minor administrative change. They were already living together, already committed to each other in every way that counted, and Alex (unbeknownst to Lily) had already drawn up the legal documents that made her his heir. This legal change should not have mattered as much as it did. But it did. He looked at Lily and saw possibilities he hadn't imagined even after he'd put the ring on her finger. The future was going to be awesome. 

Scott and Jean were standing next to a pillar when they arrived back at City Hall, dressed reasonably well for the occasion - slacks and a dress - despite the blowing wind. Alex mused that they obviously hadn't told Ororo where they were going - the weather was getting colder, not warmer. After hugs were exchanged, they went inside. 

"At least you're not wearing jeans," Scott muttered as they watched Piotr decipher the directions to the chapel. 

Alex smiled. He could tell Scott was really very happy for him and that the put-upon act was just that - an act. Scott never dealt well with surprises, be they Sentinels or impulsive dinner plans by Jean.

Point of fact, Alex was wearing a tuxedo, complete with tails. "I figured it would be the only way we'd be able to tell this picture from any others of the two of us together," he told his brother, mostly for the reaction he got. 

"Don't let him bother you," Jean told Lily. "He's having spontaneity issues again. _I_ think this is a great idea. I was a wreck before my wedding and you can imagine how much help I had and how little I actually had to worry about. And I love the dress."

Alex did, too. Lily hadn't been any kind of superstitious about letting him see her in it before the wedding. 

"I'm getting it dyed blue next week," she told Jean. "It's off the rack from Lord & Taylor's."

Piotr and Orly, walking a little ahead to avoid the family bickering, stopped. "I think we're going the wrong way," Orly said, pointing at a sign. Piotr, the one who had originally picked this direction, frowned. Alex felt obligated to come up with past instances of Piotr's navigation skills dooming them all. 

After they had stood in the middle of the hallway looking helpless for about five minutes, a rather harried civil servant took pity on the lost posse and guided them through an office and into another hallway that was right around the corner from where they needed to be. With a quick "Congratulations", their sherpa disappeared through one of the stairwell doors that looked like it was original to the building. 

Finding long wooden benches against the walls outside the wooden double-doors to the chapel, the group sat down to wait. They still had fifteen minutes. 

"Should I ask how long you've been planning this?" Scott asked. 

"A few weeks," Alex admitted, giving up trying to keep his cufflink from irritating the scratch he'd gotten on his wrist while helping the paleontology group re-assemble a small dinosaur skeleton. (While dinosaurs interested him greatly, he'd had an ulterior motive - there were relatively large bits of rock that were going to have to be removed from some of the fossils and he wanted them to be taken off in such a fashion that he'd have enough samples to run a few tests on and stick in to his morphology presentation.) He'd scratched himself on the box, of all things. "We didn't want to make a thing out of this."

"Well, this is already a thing," Scott told him, checking his watch. "It's just a smaller thing than what would have happened had you told everyone. Did you get a chance to tell Dad?"

"Yeah," Alex said, enjoying Scott's surprised reaction to the answer. "He called out of the blue last week. I figured he'd keep the secret."

"It was the week after Christmas," Scott pointed out, standing up. "It was hardly out of the blue."

"How often does Dad actually remember what month it is down here?" 

"Point," Scott admitted. Christopher Summers had made a greater effort to keep tabs on his sons in recent years, although his life as an interstellar pirate did tend to put a crimp in any grand plans for close contact.

Alex watched Jean try to put some of the small white flowers she had been carrying into Lily's hair. He was sure there was a little telekinesis being used to help out and wondered if Orly noticed or even cared. She had taken the whole 'Alex is a mutant' thing with complete calm.

"Did you call your mother?" Orly asked Lily as Jean stepped back and took a photo of them. 

"I'll send her a postcard," Lily replied, smiling for the camera. "Or Dad will tell her. Dad knows."

Alex chuckled as Orly sighed and then shrugged his shoulders artlessly as she looked pointedly at him. He had tried to get Lily to call her mother - had even strategized with Captain Beck, who was in the middle of a training exercise and wouldn't have been able to make any day they'd be free - but Lily wouldn't budge. She'd had an argument with her mother two weeks ago (over Lily and Alex sending her a Christmas card; Alex wasn't sure of the details other than the fact that Starshine Beck didn't celebrate Christmas) and it was only Alex's pleading jointly with her father that Lily was going to send a picture through email. 

Jean looked around and then closed her eyes for a second. "Okay, the coast is clear," she announced. "Group photo."

Alex pushed himself off the bench with a groan. Jean tended to get trigger-happy with photos and she not only had her digital camera, but also her cell phone also had a camera as well. 

"Orly, don't mind the flying objects," he warned as he watched Lily's friend watch the camera and phone float out to a position and a height that could capture them all in one shot.

* * *

Lily was in the kitchen putting away the last of the groceries when she heard Alex hoot exultantly from their study. 

"Alex?"

They had gotten back from their honeymoon last weekend and had spent the week catching holy hell - over dinner parties - from their various groups of friends for having eloped in the first place. The last few days had finally quieted down and, with the semester about to begin, things were sliding towards normalcy. 

"They're back," Alex announced as he fairly sprang into the kitchen, cell phone in hand. "They appeared in the middle of the backyard this afternoon. Just where they had disappeared from. Boom, splash, the timestream spit them back out again."

Lily closed the pantry door and nearly turned around right into Alex, who was half-hovering, half-hopping foot-to-foot with glee. "That's fantastic!" she exclaimed. It really was - even with updates from the mysterious Askani, everyone was a little nervous. "Is everyone all right?"

"Nathan's pretty fried," Alex admitted, leaning against the stove. "But Jean said he's a helluva lot better off than he was after the whole Phoenix thing the other year and he just needs to rest and rebuild his shields. Besides, it wouldn't be a real mission if he didn't come back stressed out to the point of being a puddle of psionic goo."

"That sounds like Scott's opinion," Lily said as she tossed the lettuce at him. Even if Jean and Scott were relatively blasé about Nathan's condition, Lily spared a thought to hope that he felt better quickly. She liked Nathan even as she was scared by him. Every time they were in the same place together (which meant some family event in Westchester), he had made a point of talking with her - usually about fluid dynamics and how it could be applied to the timestream. Especially in light of the way the sextet had disappeared, Scott had asked her if anything they had discussed could be useful to getting them back. It wasn't.

"Other than that," Alex went on, opening the fridge to put away the lettuce and then holding out his hand for Lily to toss him the rest of the vegetables, "The greatest injury seems to be Sam falling on his ass after seeing Dana in war paint and carrying a gun."

Lily snorted. "Well, it's Dana," she replied, handing the bag to Alex. As much as she liked Sam, she had always been a little resistant to Dana's attempts at friendship. Lily was pretty sure it was merely petty resentment on her part - Dana was so casual about all that she had given up to be with the X-Men that Lily wondered if she even understood how privileged she was to be able to be so cavalier about it all. "One minute it's a Bergdorf's bag and the next it's a plasma cannon. I'd probably fall on my ass as well. At least Sam's ass is invulnerable."

Lily didn't even pause to think about how she had come to be so _comfortable_ with the whole concept of time-space portals and alien technology and everything else that the X-Men did their best to hide from the public. Well, it wasn't really comfort, she knew. It was more a learned ability to run quickly over the surface of such topics. Because if you dwelled on them, you were likely to go a little crazy. 

"How did the twins' reunion with their parents go?" she asked as Alex closed the fridge.

"Scott didn't say on the voicemail," Alex replied, sitting down at the table. "He just said that Piotr's been relieved of duty."

"I hope that goes all right," Lily said thoughtfully as she ran water for the kettle. "Both for Piotr and for Logan and Sulven and the twins."

"Yeah," Alex agreed. "They've spent almost half of their lives with Piotr, pretty much. When Logan and Sulven left, the twins were just starting to try to pull themselves into a standing position and barely acknowledged anyone. Now they walk and talk and are approaching little-peoplehood."

"And they're fiercely attached to Piotr," Lily added, opening the tin of barley tea. "And he to them. When you call Scott back, why don't you offer to have Piotr stay here for a few days? The separation might be good for everyone."

Alex nodded in a way that Lily knew that he had heard her, but he was very much lost in his own thoughts. She waited until the tea had steeped and been poured into the thermos before sitting down next to him. 

"Penny for your thoughts," she said. 

"I'm just thinking about Piotr," Alex said, leaning back in his chair and taking Lily's hand. He had become very fond of playing with her left hand - and its new ring - recently. "He's... Being with the twins made him... I don't know..."

"Happy?" Lily suggested. 

"Yeah," Alex agreed. "He was so miserable in Scotland. I'd get these really short emails from him - and Piotr's not a short-email kind of guy. And then he came here and he had a purpose - he's happiest when he's being relied on for something - and now that responsibility has been taken away from him... I was hoping that I could be some sort of example for him while he was here - you know, the whole 'I left the X-Men and lived to tell about it' thing? But I don't think he saw it that way at all. He's happy that I'm happy, but... he's a responsibility addict, you know?"

"Everyone wants to be needed," Lily pointed out, withdrawing her hand so that she could get up and bring over the thermos and two cups. Piotr Rasputin had been an abstract concept until she had met him at Alex's birthday party the other year. She knew he was a friend of Alex's, had been part of what Alex called 'the Australia crowd,' and that he lived in Scotland. But now that Piotr was here in the States and Alex was making time to see him regularly, he had exploded into three dimensions as a person whom she could see (along with Logan) Alex being friends with regardless of their shared past.

"But with Piotr, it's more of a need," Alex said with a grimace. "When we were in Australia, he'd get crazy when we were sitting around for too long. I mean, we all went a little stir crazy at times - living in the Outback isolated from civilization doesn't do anyone's sanity any good - but he'd be jonesing because we were sitting around and not helping anyone. And the sick part is that this addiction... It's what he needs, but it's not what he wants."

"You're losing me," Lily said as she poured the cups and then sat back down. She hadn't really known Piotr before he'd become the twins' ersatz parent; she couldn't imagine him as other than he was.  
"He wants to be a superhero and gets itchy when he's not, right?"

"Not quite," Alex replied. "He needs to have a duty to fulfill. But he has wants that are completely incompatible with that. I wasn't around for most of the time that he was Peter Nicholas, but Jean and Scott and Bobby and the others say that that was the happiest they'd ever seen him. He was _content_. He has never been content as Piotr Rasputin - at least not since he left the farm in Siberia."

"And you were hoping he'd follow your lead and try to take care of his own wants for a while," Lily finished. 

"Yeah," Alex said. "But instead, he found a new responsibility. And now that the twins have been reunited with their parents, he's going to be looking for his next fix..."

"Look, if it's really an addiction like you say it is," Lily began, sipping her tea before continuing. "Then he won't take anyone's help until he wants to. And if he's really just like so many other of the folks who live in Westchester and he's acting out of a rather heightened sense of social obligation, then..."

"Then he's never going to be happy ever," Alex finished with a frown. 

"You know, we're supposed to be all giddy and stuff now that everyone's back," Lily pointed out. "We can mourn Piotr's choices later. Right now, let's get back to hopping up and down about everyone coming home again, okay?"

"Deal," Alex said, smiling. "I should call Scott back. Once Nathan's a little less on edge, there's going to be a thingie."

"And we all love X-thingies," Lily replied with a nod.

* * *

"Lily?"

"I love my students."

"I know you do. Especially when they make you bang your head on the desk like that."

"I love my students."

"What did they do this time?"

"One of them disproved the law of conservation of momentum."

"Really? Can we work with it?"

"Only if you discount inertia."

"Personally, I've always thought inertia was a little overrated."

"Be that as it may, I don't want any of my students recreating laws of the universe."

"You know, one of them could be doing just that. That student could be doing just that. If they're a mutant, then maybe they could do away with inertia."

"Don't give me those thoughts. These are the same kids who get stuck on inclined planes and none of them could identify a normal force if it glowed in the dark. I don't _want_ them to be able to undo anything."

"You know, I wonder if Charles ever really considered that... A growing population of dumb-as-dirt mutants."

"We're just growing fat and plump for the alien invaders, aren't we?"

"I don't think the Shi'ar like pork."

* * *

"Damn it."

"Is there a problem, oh love of my life?" Alex asked jauntily as he entered their bedroom. He had been looking for the scrap of paper that he'd written a phone number on and it wasn't in his backpack. He was hoping it was in his pants pocket. 

"I need to go dress shopping," Lily muttered from her closet. "And I need to figure out when to go dress shopping when I'm not giving or grading a test."

"Do you need a dress for the reception or for the wedding?" Alex rooted through the hamper for the pants he had worn on Friday. Finding them, he checked the pockets and found, in addition to thirty-five cents, the 'while you were out' slip he had used as scrap paper. 

"The wedding," Lily replied, closing the closet door with her foot and flopping on their bed with a sigh. "I have my cocktail dress that I can wear to the reception, but I need something suitable for an outdoor afternoon wedding."

Alex made a vague noise of sympathy. Next weekend was a busy one and it was all his fault. 

Friday night was the opening of a new permanent exhibit at the museum and the reception was black-tie. There would be heads of state - a considerable portion of the display items had come from Turkey and Armenia - and the usual New York hoi polloi. It wasn't an exhibit Alex had anything to do with except helping Rodi spell a few words for the display cards but it was the first big opening since his arrival on staff and he had been extended an invitation by Linda, the vivacious head of the paleontology group. 

Then, after recovering from that affair, he and Lily would have to trek down to Kentucky for Sam and Dana's wedding. Alex was amused by the preparations - none of which he or Lily were involved with. Lily's lack of participation was purely her own decision - Jean had called regularly to include her. But while Lily was all for searching the internet for the best prices on bunting and rental chairs, she didn't want to be a more intimate part of the process. Jean had called him at work to ask him if there was a problem, but Alex didn't think there was. Lily just wasn't _into_ that sort of thing and while she'd be a reluctant major domo if, say, Orly were to announce an engagement and an involved wedding plan, Lily and Dana weren't exactly buddies. 

"Is there such a difference in attire for an outdoor afternoon wedding than an indoor afternoon wedding?" Alex asked, leaning against the chest of drawers. "Why can't you wear what you wore to Paul and Stephanie's wedding?"

"That wasn't an afternoon wedding," Lily pointed out, not sitting up. "That was a Saturday evening wedding. Completely different."

"Oh," Alex said, thankful for the billionth time for the invention of the jacket and tie. "You're giving the exam on Wednesday, right?"

"Yeah," Lily replied, finally sitting up. "I've gotten the test half-written, but I want to finish it tomorrow night so I have Tuesday to deal with any unanticipated problems. Wednesday is the test and I blocked Wednesday night, Thursday, and then Friday morning after class to grade the things because I know I'm not going to get anything done over the weekend and I need to get them back by Monday and I can't mark a hundred exams at once or I'll go batty. Battier than I am. And some time in the middle of all that I have to come up with something for my grad class because they don't have a lab this week."

"Why don't you have TA's do the grading?" Alex asked, moving over to sit on the bed next to Lily. "I only have one class and I get grad students to do my marking."

"That's because you teach at a _private_ school," Lily said knowingly. "The grad students at CUNY are adjuncts - they have their own classes to teach and their own exams to mark. No TA's."

"Ugh," Alex muttered with a frown. He'd thought that Lily graded her own exams out of new-professor excitement, not out of lack of alternatives. "Okay. So assuming that I chain you to your desk for the rest of the evening - including taking over dinner duties from you - and you have a very good afternoon of coming up with new ways to torture your kids tomorrow afternoon, then theoretically, you'll have Tuesday afternoon free to go shopping, right?"

"Yeah," Lily agreed, shifting over to lean on him. "If I don't use that time as prep for my grad kids."

"It'll give you something to do while you proctor the exam," Alex told her. "It's not like you didn't spend quality time on your vacation setting up your lesson plan. Problem solved."

"In theory," Lily said. 

"Well, let's put theory into practice," Alex told her, leaning back and grabbing her torso as she lost her balance from the sudden shift. He stood up, dragging her awkwardly-but-gently with him. "Time to chain you to the desk."

"Hey," Lily squawked, trying to stand upright and not able to. "Let me go, you thug."

Alex gave his best evil cackle and started walking backwards, forcing Lily to do the same but tilted at a precarious angle and relying completely on him to keep her from falling over. "You're supposed to trust me," he said as she tried to dig her heels in to the runner that covered the wood floor in the small hallway between the bedroom and the living room. All she succeeded in doing was dragging the rug with her heels.

"I trust you as far as I can throw you," she muttered as Alex made a sharp right mid-hallway and pushed her into their study, not stopping until they were at her desk. 

"Now stay there before I get a belt to tie you to your chair."

"We haven't done that in a while," Lily purred. 

"No distractions," Alex told her firmly. 

"A one hundred kilogram geologist is shot at three hundred sixteen meters per second out of a cannon that is aimed fifteen degrees up from horizontal and is parked on a six hundred meter cliff," Lily began challengingly. "Assuming no wind, what is his final velocity and where will he land?"

"In the kitchen, where he will be found making an omelet," Alex told her easily, taking the paper with the phone number out of his pocket and dropping it on his desk on the way towards the kitchen. He'd call Robert Thivans - one of the directors of the Lamont-Doherty Laboratories - in the morning. Frohmeyer had promised to give him a heads-up if he heard anything about a suitable job offer for fieldwork; Alex hadn't expected his former advisor to all but get him hired at his dream job - the geosciences facility was known for the size of its travel budget. 


	7. August 2004 - April 2005

"There's a bar, let's stop."

"Lily," Alex groaned, not even slowing down the rental car. "Think positively. You keep expecting the worst and that's what you'll get."

"It's what I've gotten for twenty-six years," Lily muttered darkly, not turning her head from where she was looking out the window. 

She had been outfoxed. Her husband and her father had collaborated behind her back and a West Coast trip that wasn't going to be all fun and games at the start had suddenly started to look an awful lot like an obstacle course. 

The original plan had been to fly to Portland and see Grandma Ina - well advanced in her Alzheimer's and not able to speak on the phone any more without great assistance - and then drive up to visit with her father in Washington before flying from Seattle to Anchorage and catching up with Scott and Jean (up for a vacation) and visiting with Alex's grandparents. 

But the two weeks of grandparents had been cut into when Lily's father had announced that he'd be in San Francisco for a charity event - he'd called and suggested they meet there and then travel up to Portland together. Lily had been all set to say no and that they'd see him in Washington, but Alex had gone and found airline tickets to San Francisco that were so much cheaper than the flight to Seattle that they could take the train between cities and still save money.

The end result was that eight months into marriage, Alex was finally going to meet his mother-in-law. And while he seemed fairly eager - all he knew about her was what Lily had told her and Lily would be the first to admit that she wasn't exactly objective - Lily thought that his initial burst of enthusiasm would melt away soon enough.

People who had only heard Lily tell colorful stories of her mother's eccentricities might think that there was little love between the two. But the truth was that Lily loved her mother very much. She just couldn't stay in the same room with her and maintain her sanity. They were different people with different sets of beliefs and were it not for the fact that they were related, there would be no conceivable reason for them ever to associate. Which was true for a lot of families, but not with this degree of impatience and inflexibility built in. 

Lily always said that there were certain people not cut out to be parents and Starshine Machney Beck (by any name, although Lily was _not_ going to call her Onamara or whatever the latest nominal re-invention was) was one of them. Star (as Lily's father called her) wasn't cruel or unkind or inconsiderate, although Lily had occasionally called her the last and meant it sincerely. She was just... unprepared to accept great responsibilities and unable to recognize that shortcoming. And, as Lily and her father knew all too well, she didn't want to be told of such a shortcoming. 

Star _wanted_ to be relied upon, but as far as Lily could tell, had failed in every attempt to be someone's foundation. She had tried marriage, but had quickly folded under the stresses of being a military wife - Lily didn't know if it had been ambition or naiveté that had made her mother decide to try marrying into the Navy after growing up in a commune. After the divorce, Star had tried being employed and had found that she didn't like The Establishment (i.e., anyone who required that she show up every day at the same time). Star's most enduring attempt was motherhood and that was because it was harder to end that one - although Lily's father had been forced to try. 

Lily and her mother were prone to ideological fights and, during one notable battle, Lily had called her mother Hester Prynne for treating her daughter as the permanent symbol of her own weakness in being seduced by the evil conformists. They hadn't spoken for months after that.

"Does any of this look familiar?" Alex asked as he followed the directions they had printed out before they had left New York. 

"In a vague way," Lily replied, shaking her head to clear the thoughts running through it. She didn't need to be putting herself into such a mood right before she saw her mother. "I haven't been out here for any length of time for ten years... Oh, but there's one of the places at which I was nominally educated." She pointed ahead to a small earth-toned cottage. Alex snorted.

Lily considered herself a failed flower child, the willfully disobedient little capitalist-in-training who had never accepted peace, cooperation, and good feelings for all over personal achievement. Determined to raise a child who would share her values, Star had enrolled Lily in alternative education at every juncture. As a result, Lily had endured 'group learning,' 'child-based study,' and a couple of other variations on the theme. It was all crap, Lily was sure -- even more sure as she was on the other end of the pedagogical stick. Not one of her kids - even the undergrads - had gone through the alt-ed routine and Lily knew precisely why. Ten years of alternative education and she had had to learn math and science on her own - rote learning was considered 'demoralizing' to the child. The three years she spent in public school while living with her father and grandparents became halcyon memories after she was returned to San Fran and Lily strove every day to be true to those standards instead of the ones to which she was subjected under her mother's supervision. By fifteen, she'd had endless notes to her mother written by teachers saddened by young Lily's competitiveness and refusal to enhance the communal learning experience. By sixteen, she'd worked hard enough on her own to have fulfilled all of the requirements for graduation as set forth by the California Board of Regents and her Enrichment Center had been all too happy to write fulsome notes of recommendation so long as she'd leave. Which she had. All the way to Massachusetts. Cal Tech had been a possibility - and there was the added perk of tuition benefits for staying in-state - but it was too close. And with no close friends from high school to tie her to the West Coast - she had been the sullen outsider, the dandelion in the lush lawn of communal education - there had been no reason apart from her aunt and the already-failing Grandma Ina to ever return.

"Which right turn am I supposed to be making?" Alex moaned as they waited for the light to change. There was a fork in the road to the right. 

"The left-most one," Lily told him. "I remember where we are now."

The rest of the drive was depressingly short and Alex found a parking space across the street from the house. Lily let Alex carry the plant they had bought for her mother and she rang the doorbell. 

"Hi, Mom," she said as the door opened. 

Star looked like what she was - the granddaughter of Irish potato farmers. Blonde-haired and green-eyed, she was solid without being fat, sturdy without looming. It was a figure that worked well with the Earth Mother lifestyle she had adopted. Lily had inherited the sturdiness if not necessarily the solidity, although both of her parents thought she looked much more like Star's mother, a tallish, broad-shouldered, dark-haired woman considered beautiful by 1940's standards, than anyone else. 

"Lily!" Star cried out happily, opening the screen door and stepping out on to the porch. It was a nice house - a small Victorian - and Lily had always liked it, despite the clutter.

Lily managed to survive being squeezed to within an inch of her life and breathed deeply as she was let go. It always amazed her how much of her enmity disappeared when actually faced with her mother and how much of the shroud she held over their relationship was solely her own... not imagination, but... design, perhaps. At least that's what it always felt like at the beginning, before there could be any reminders that there was a good reason they only spoke by phone every month or so. (Apart from ignoring the endless forwarded articles Star sent by email, any of which would send her blood pressure through the roof should she actually look at them.) Which is why right now she felt a little guilty about having waited so long to have her mother meet Alex, but was fairly sure that regret would fade by the time they left.

"And you must be Alex," Star said, beaming, as she turned to face him. "I'm so glad to finally meet you!"

"Same here," Alex replied as he, too, was squeezed tightly. 

"And you brought me greenery," Star enthused as she took the plant from Alex after letting him go. "Why don't we go inside? I'll made tea." 

Lily watched Alex's reaction as they passed through the hallway and into the kitchen. Star was a collector of things. Pottery, talismans, plants, magazines, and various ethnic items crowded every horizontal surface. The house looked part trading post, part thrift shop, and part museum. Lily had never figured out how her mother kept the place clear of dust. 

"I want to hear all about your wedding," Star went on cheerily, talking over her shoulder as she walked. "I always wanted to elope, but Lily's father couldn't run off anywhere or else the shore patrol would be chasing after us for going UA. We got married on a Friday night and he had to be back on ship on Monday morning."

Green tea and homemade cookies were promptly served, Star keeping up a running litany of questions, pausing just long enough for Alex and Lily to get the answers in. Alex looked to be enjoying himself immensely and, when Star had disappeared upstairs to dig up photo albums, he gave her a knowing look. 

"I can't believe this is what you've been railing about all these years," he told her, a disappointed look on his face. "She's really quite nice."

"I never said she was mean," Lily replied, taking another cookie. Her mother was the only person she knew who could find a constructive use for carob. "I just said that her voluminous quantity of quirks could get very trying very quickly. She's got all of these pseudo-scientific explanations for everything and doesn't want to hear that what she believes is not actually the truth. Just wait until Dad gets here and we try to figure out where to go out for dinner. You'll get the full hour treatment about organic food and a version of mineralogy that will have every geologist nerve in your body standing on end."

Star returned carrying four heavy photo albums and the next two hours were spent poring over pictures. Lily hadn't looked at the albums since she was a teenager and was surprised at the breadth and variety of the pictures therein. Alex had to be pounded on the back after he started coughing from laughing too hard at the pictures of Lily dressed as Wicket for Halloween ("Oh, we couldn't get her out of that costume," Star sighed, smiling at the memory. "She wanted to sleep in it, too.")

They had just finished looking at some of the school pictures - Lily looked pained in all of them - when there was a knock at the side door. 

"Anyone home?" Captain Beck called. 

"In the kitchen, Dan," Star called out, standing up. 

Alex, to his credit (Lily thought), didn't react when her parents greeted each other warmly. She had explained to him long ago that her parents still loved each other; they just couldn't accept each other's differences well enough to live together.

Lily got up to say hello to her father and Alex did as well. Lily was happy that the two of them seemed to be getting along all right - Alex had told her of their connection from Genosha and that had gone a long way towards explaining her father's initial reaction. 

The conversation about where to go to dinner started early and ran late. Star was a fundamentalist vegan and refused to go anyplace that served meat. Lily breathed a sigh of relief when her father capitulated after the third suggestion of the Ayurvedic restaurant, although by that point Star had gotten on to the topic of how man had evolved past the need to ingest animal protein and Lily had caught Alex making pained faces. She returned them with a knowing look. 

Dinner itself was a relatively innocent affair - despite the bits of pro-Sentinel conversation that drifted over from the next table. Star didn't know about Alex's other identity, or even that he was a mutant at all, but she was pro-mutant on general principles and muttered about how someone who could be so careful about keeping their body pure could allow their mind to be so polluted. Lily and her father deftly managed to distract Star from most of her longer harangues on the matters of government, food, and the environment. 

Lily's father had a hotel reservation downtown and, despite Lily's protestation, she and Alex were staying with Star for the two days they'd be in San Francisco. They made plans to meet her father at the train station Friday afternoon and dropped him off before returning back to the house. 

"I've re-done your room since you moved out," Star said cheerily as she led the way upstairs. "All of your things are packed up, so if there's anything here you've been missing, please feel free to take it with you. I wouldn't throw out anything of yours without asking."

"We've got a small place, Mom," Lily told her as she followed Alex into the room. "Wow..." Gone were the posters and mementoes of childhood. Instead, the place looked remarkably mature and... subdued, at least in comparison to the rest of the house. Blues and greens were the dominant colors where the rest of the house was a riot of colors on a brown background. 

"Cleaner than you ever kept it, that's for sure," Alex said as he looked around. 

Lily hit him in the arm. "You got a new bed?" The bed that she'd slept in as a child was replaced with a queen-sized. 

"There was a two-for-one sale when I was re-doing the guest bedroom," Star explained with an almost shy shrug. "And you were already serious with Alex at the time, so I was just... optimistic, let's say. That you two would come and visit. And now you have!" She beamed and Lily felt guilty anew. "All right, I'll let you two unwind. You've had a very long day and it's almost one in the morning by your body clocks."

Goodnights were said and Star closed the door behind her. 

"While I can see how some of her stranger views can be a bit grating by the fifth iteration," Alex said as he sat down on the bed and took off his shoes. "I really don't see any basis for the continued harboring of grudges."

"I know," Lily admitted, letting herself fall back on the bed. It was a medium-softness mattress, not the hard-as-stone ones that she knew her mother preferred. "I'm a married lady now and can bury the hatchet not in someone's back. It's just... I don't know that I'm up for fully integrating her into my life, you know? I can do better than seeing her once every few years, but I'm not ready to schedule regular visits. We're both on our best behavior - this is the longest we've gone without a screaming match in years and I'm not taking bets that we'll last the whole visit without you having to separate us."

"I'm not asking you to change overnight," Alex told her, pulling his shirt over his head and pulling on the t-shirt he only wore when sleeping at someone else's home. "I'm not asking you to do anything but look at things from a different perspective, that's all. Speaking as someone whose only surviving parent is literally out of this world..."

Lily laughed. "Yeah, yeah. Speaking of, we should call Scott tomorrow and make sure he has the new arrival time now that we're flying from Portland and not Seattle."

Alex nodded agreement and got up to find the bathroom, leaving Lily to her thoughts.

* * *

"So," Scott began as they trundled up the stairs carrying luggage and food, "How did it really go?"

Alex snorted, but looked over his shoulder to where Jean and Lily were still talking by the car before answering. "Lily and her mother lasted a whole sixteen hours before snapping at each other," he said, catching the door with his toe from where Scott was holding it open with his heel. "Unfortunately, that includes the time we were sleeping off our jetlag. They were both trying, I could tell, but another day in San Fran and there would have been blood spilled."

"That bad?" Scott asked, putting the grocery bags down on the kitchen table. 

"That bad," Alex confirmed with a sigh. "It's like every issue we've ever had with Dad, except multiplied because the two of them actually did live together for years and not only have all of the 'you were a selfish parent' issues, but also the crap that builds up from constant contact. I don't expect them to say a word to each other until Christmas... Except my mother-in-law resents anyone using December twenty-fifth as a notable date..." 

The initially warm reunion had cooled by the next morning, in fact, when Lily cut short her mother's lecture on the evils of dairy products that had started when Star had put out soymilk with coffee. Star accused Lily of being intolerant, Lily called her mother gullible, and it had gone downhill from there. Alex had finished his coffee in the kitchen alone. The two women apologized before Lily and Alex had set out for the day to explore the city, but after dinner had another row over the reasonableness of the more radical laws of nearby Berkeley. After that, Alex decided that they could take their meals away from the house. 

"And that was only the first stop on the emotional wringer tour," Alex continued as Scott trailed along to the opposite end of the house and the guest bedroom. "Lily was just recovered enough by the time we got to Portland to fall apart again after seeing her grandmother."

Lily had known that her beloved grandmother had gotten frail as the Alzheimer's had progressed - even at this stage, the disease didn't affect the body per se, more the ability to exercise it. And while her father and her aunt had told her that Grandma Ina was in no physical distress, Lily wasn't prepared to see the... husk that the woman she'd always known as vibrant had become. Alex, too, was surprised, as he had heard all of the same updates from Lily's Aunt Eleanor. Ina wasn't bedridden, but couldn't walk anywhere unsupported and unsupervised and had just gotten out of the hospital. The mental deterioration was about what they had been led to believe - for the last few months, Ina would only speak Korean, no matter what language she was spoken to in. Alex had been introduced to Ina and she had gripped him in a surprisingly strong embrace and told him, in Korean, that she hoped he and Lily would be happy. The next day, Ina had asked if Lily was seeing someone and Alex was introduced (sans hug) again. 

"So you two are looking for a vacation from your vacation," Scott surmised, sitting down on the edge of the bed. 

"Pretty much," Alex agreed. 

"Well, if it'll start things off on the right foot," Scott said, "Our grandparents are in their usual fine form. We're expected to drag you around for dinner tonight, but Grandma said that you two could put off the 'heavy visiting' until later on in the week."

Alex snorted. Four generations of Summerses were running around and their grandparents were still the most grounded and sane of any of them. 

"Did we lose our wives?" he asked, cocking an ear when he heard no voices. They must still be outside. 

Scott narrowed his eyes for a moment. "They're by the vegetable patch," he said. "Jean's ridiculously proud of the fact that the cucumber plant she put in the ground back when we were here in the spring is actually bearing fruit. I think she's just really excited that she can grow something without Ororo's help."

Alex chuckled and leaned against the vanity table. "Speaking of, should I take the fact that you're tanned and relaxed as meaning that nothing funky is going on back home?"

"Well, nothing unusually funky," Scott allowed with a wry smile. "Nathan and Domino are off doing dirty deeds, but as long as there's no mayday and no call for bail, I'm not even going to let myself think about it. I spoke to Ororo yesterday and she assured me the usual level of chaos is being maintained and if that holds true, then Jean and I can stick to our promise to stay here until November."

"Promise to each other or promise to Ororo?" Alex had known that Scott and Jean had planned to take a few months off, but this was the first time that they sounded serious about keeping those plans. 

"Each other," Scott admitted. "A lot has happened this year, you know? You got married, Sam got married, the whole re-appearance thing and watching the twins running around the mansion..."

"You're feeling old, aren't you?" Alex accused. Scott had turned thirty-six a few months back, although he looked younger. 

"You sound like Jean," Scott groused, standing up. "It's not the number. It's the fact that I've been doing the superhero thing for half my life already and I'm starting to become aware of the fact that I've got a real life, too."

Alex gave Scott his best 'annoying little brother' smirk and led the way back towards the front door. Once outside, they found Jean and Lily sitting in the gazebo by the back of the house. Lily looked a little less tightly wound than she had been on the flight from Oregon. There was still a certain... fragility to her calm, though. As if the wrong thing said would send her over the edge she'd been teetering on ever since California. 

They chatted for a while more - Jean wanted to know all about Alex's interview at the Lamont-Doherty Labs - before they headed back inside. Alex took a shower and Lily took a nap and everyone relaxed until it was time to head over to Alex and Scott's grandparents' home, where Lily was lavished with attention (it was her first face-to-face meeting with them after two years of phone contact) and Alex was surprised with a two-month-belated birthday cake. The best present of all, however, was how demonstrably relaxed Lily looked the following morning. It was only then that Alex put his mind to how best to enjoy the rest of their vacation - that was finally turning into a vacation.

* * *

"You're going to do it, aren't you?"

Alex looked up sharply from where he was chasing peas around on his plate. "Would it bother you if I did?"

Lily made a face, but took a sip of water before saying anything. They had been dancing around the topic ever since Christmas, when Nathan had dragged Alex off for a private conversation during the party. "Do I have a choice?"

"You're my wife, Lily," Alex sighed, putting down his fork. "You _do_ have some say in the matter."

"But I don't," Lily replied, "That's the thing. I can't just say 'Alex, I'm scared you're going to get hurt. I don't want you to go off and help save the world. I'd rather risk everyone else's life and possibly the fate of mankind.' You know?"

The meeting had taken place on Thursday, two days after their first wedding anniversary. All of the X-Men, past and present, gathered in Westchester to discuss Cable's long-in-progress plans (and it was really hard to think of him as Nathan in this context, Lily realized) to stop the rise of Apocalypse once and for all. Lily had been asked to come as well -at first she thought it was just a sop to the fact that she was the only non-mutant spouse of an X-type, but Cable had said that he wanted her expertise with flow and distortion effects as part of the group working on observing the timestream. By the time the meeting was over, Lily suspected that Cable just wanted someone in that division who hadn't been working for years at cross-purposes to his.

Even with two meal breaks, it had been a thirteen-hour conference. Cable had spent the first few hours detailing the (apparently already existing) network he had been molding to his purposes for the past several years. Thousands of people from around the world dedicated to just this task, just this cause. Lily had been awed, even as she reminded herself that one did not get to be the internationally feared terrorist that Cable was without an extensive network of connections. But the network was just the superstructure; Cable needed certain mutant abilities to carry out his plan. And if Cable wanted Lily to be part of the superstructure, he wanted Alex to be part of the main force. And therein lay the difficulty for her - she was not going to be in any real danger; Alex was going to be on the front lines. 

"I don't know what to tell you," Alex confessed, picking up his fork again. "I can't say that you knew this sort of thing was a possibility when you married me because that would be incredibly patronizing. I can't tell you that I'm only interested in doing this because I might be necessary because that's not the case - I'd want to volunteer even if Cable didn't ask me to be there. I can't even tell you that this will be the last time I'll be involved in something like this... All I can say is that I do appreciate that this isn't easy for you. And that I wish there was some other way."

Lily nodded mutely and stabbed at her chicken breast. "I think I just need a little more time to make the leap from theoretical to actual," she said after a long pause. "I mean, every other time you've gone off that I've known about, you've always downplayed the danger and run off to Dana before I could see the damage. This time... I know what you're in for. And that's what scares me."

Alex nodded, but said nothing and both of them went back to eating their dinner. They broke the silence by talking of other things - Valeri's upcoming defense, Orly's birthday present, Sulven's uniquely Askani take on the twins' refusal to even consider beginning potty training. 

"I'm going to take the offer from Lamont-Doherty," Alex said as they put down their forks. Columbia's Geosciences Center had offered him a research position that would complement well with his spot at the Museum of Natural History. "I was pretty sure I was going to do it before Cable's meeting, but now... It'll make life easy in terms of taking time off to train. I can tell Fordham that it was about all the stuff that I was pissed off about, though."

"Go for it," Lily encouraged, standing up and holding out her hand so that Alex would hand her his plate. Alex had been bitter about Fordham's broken promises ever since they had gotten back from Alaska last August to find out that the university wanted Alex to teach the freshman earth science survey again - and this time, would he like two sections of it? It wasn't a full-time position, the department chair never answered any of Alex's questions about when it might become such, and there certainly wasn't any sort of job security to go with it. They had discussed Alex's leaving then and the disappointing response he had gotten to his questions at the end of the fall semester had merely been icing on the cake. The position at Lamont-Doherty was more work for about the same money, but it was work Alex enjoyed and Lily thought he'd be wise to accept it.

"Besides," Alex said, standing up and following her to the counter with the bowl of leftover broccoli. "I don't think I'm exactly cut out for academia. Classrooms make me twitchy."

Lily snorted as she put the plates and silverware into the dishwasher. "No, really?" 

Alex was invariably in a better mood when he was coming from the museum than when he was returning from class. Lily really had no pity for him - at least his kids spoke English (Lily had long held a suspicion that she had a job in part because she could yell at her students in Korean) - but she did want him to be happy. And getting out of teaching - at least the sort of teaching that went on in a classroom (she thought he'd be an excellent field instructor; he explained things well) - would do that. 

Twelve weeks later, both of them were wondering if maybe they hadn't bitten off more than they could chew. Lily in particular was fed up with what she called Project Armageddon. Because she was going to be working closely with Cable's network of operatives, its chiefs had required her to undergo mental shield training - they weren't pleased with her ability to keep telepaths out of her head - and had had issues with her father's military background. Apparently her father had ferried SHIELD troops around on a few missions and, for reasons that Lily neither knew about nor cared, this bothered them. And all of that was before she was granted the privilege of near-daily arguments with one of the senior timestream watchers over just how related fluid dynamics was to temporal physics. Lily herself wasn't sure of any relation - the whole idea of time travel and temporal physics as a whole had been pure fantasy a mere two years previous - but if being there helped out, even just as a placebo effect, then she'd do it and to hell with what Cable's secret society thought of her. Unlike them, she had a real life to return to afterwards. A real life that had already included exchanging her Physics I section for the undergrad Advanced Fluid Dynamics and her graduate FD survey for a seminar on Turbulent Flows. 

Alex, meanwhile, was running on fumes and most of the time that Lily saw him, he was either asleep or needed to be. What should have been two complementary jobs had turned out to be less than so. The Museum, happy with his work in the revamping of a major display in the Rocks and Minerals wing, had started offering him larger roles in larger projects (bumping up his billable hours as well as padding his CV) while the Lamont-Doherty people, thrilled to have a geo/hydro morphology expert who wasn't afraid of heights, had twice sent him packing to the Andes to visit another team's archeological excavation already in progress. Lily had changed their answering machine message to "Hi, you've reached the Summerses. One's asleep and one's not here, so please leave your message and we'll get back to you" and Alex, despite calling in frequently, hadn't noticed for two weeks.  
   
They had, in one of the few times when they were both in the same place and both conscious, sworn to the other to get as far away from work as possible for Lily's spring break. Ten days in Alaska were booked and Lily had warned Alex that not even the premature arrival of Apocalypse was going to change that. 

* * *

"Was that Scott?"

"Yeah. Just calling to check up on us, make sure we didn't get snowed in or anything."

"Oh, so that was what the 'Dude! Plasma, remember?' comment was for."

"You eavesdropped?"

"Hardly. I'm sure they heard you in Juneau. So. How's life back in New York?"

"You're going to be a great-aunt."

"What?"

"My nephew's partner is expecting. Hence I'm going to be a great-uncle and you, my dear, are to be a great-aunt."

"I can't be a great-aunt! I'm twenty-seven.... Domino's _pregnant_?"

"Yeah. It took me a minute for that to register, too. Baby's due in November."

"Same as the twins."

"Either February is an especially slow month for superheroes and we've never realized it before or else it's an Askani thing."

"Wow... Scott's going to be a grandpa."

"Technically, he already was one, but, yeah... I told you marrying into this family would never be dull."

* * *

"What are you doing?"

Alex winced. He'd hoped that Lily wouldn't get home until he was finished. "Just finishing up some paperwork," he called out. 

The glass door that opened from the study into the living room was usually open unless one of them was working and the other wasn't and he breathed a sigh of relief when she didn't stick her head in. He could hear her moving through the apartment, through the living room and around the study and into the hallway towards the bedroom. The study door into the hallway was closed; for some reason they usually left it such. 

It had started with a conversation with Logan, Sam, and Scott. One minute they were sitting around watching the Stanley Cup Finals and the next they were discussing probate court. It had been only days after Nathan had gotten a rather graphic demonstration that En Sabah Nur was ripe to be taken down and in that time, the foundations of a battle plan had already been drawn up. Fried from the intense discussions, the quartet had repaired upstairs and Logan had turned on the hockey game and in the second period there had been a commercial for insurance and Scott had quietly said that he'd already put his affairs in order - organizing his financial records, updating his insurance, getting started on drawing up a will and on assuring, for lack of a better way of putting it, a succession for the Xavier Institute. Charles had named Scott executor years ago, but there had to be contingency plans. 

Alex had been stunned but not shocked - planning ahead was Scott's thing, after all. But... In their line of work, fatalism just didn't exist. And yet. Alex was a part of the planning the same way the other veteran X-Men were - his sabbatical did not erase his past as X-Factor's leader and strategist - and he knew intellectually that there was no way that they were going to emerge from this battle unscathed. This was Apocalypse, after all. The X-Men may find ways to 'get better,' but... there was an unspoken-of sense that this time there was a very good chance someone wouldn't. And Alex wasn't sure whether to be relieved or concerned that everyone else seemed to share his fears. 

Sam had wisely surmised that they were all a little more cautious because they were getting older and they were starting to settle down. The four of them were married now and marriage brought a change in perspective - the ability to see things as more than just how they affect you. And healing factors and immortality didn't assure anything; Logan had already seen his children orphaned, albeit temporarily. 

That had been two days ago. Alex had spent much of his free time since then investigating his own situation. He and Lily had a modest savings, a mortgage, and the beginnings of a nest egg. They were comfortable, more comfortable than any couple two years out of grad school should be. Their student loans were nonexistent courtesy of their parents' military service and some aggressive grant-hunting, they both earned decent-but-not-spectacular livings (made even less spectacular by New York City's cost of living, but they both considered it a fair exchange), and Alex had found that his time spent superheroing had, quite literally, paid off. Charles had been most generous with 'back pay' for Alex's time with the X-Men and he would have a moderate pension coming from X-Factor. But all of that did Lily no good if there was no will. 

He'd gone to the lawyer this afternoon. It was someone Warren had suggested, someone who was knowledgeable about such things as striking clauses from life insurance policies that would cause trouble and who could be counted on to be discreet about disbursements should the worst come true. Alex didn't want Lily to have to deal with any of the crap that being Havok's widow would entail - starting with seventeen countries looking to put a lien on his estate due to outstanding warrants and suits and continuing on through any sort of public or media scrutiny. He had gone in with all of his paperwork in order and the lawyer, on retainer for the Worthington family for decades, had made everything simple. All Alex needed to do now was fill in the empty spaces and sign everything in triplicate. And keep everything from Lily - she was scared enough as it was and was relying on his 'damned, unbending X-Men optimism' to see her through. 

"Why aren't you working on the couch?" Lily asked as she wandered into the study. 

Alex gave her his best dazzling smile as he surreptitiously closed the folder. 

"Because I needed to use a pen and paper," he explained, standing up. "And my handwriting does not benefit from lying on the couch."

"Your handwriting doesn't benefit from anything," Lily retorted, crossing the room to his outstretched arms. She kissed him and then stood back. "Whattya think?"

Alex tilted his head thoughtfully. A new dress, he guessed. Lily was trying to 'soften her image,' a concept Alex didn't quite understand but definitely appreciated the effects of. Anything Lily did to show more leg couldn't be bad, no matter what she called it. "I like it. Wanna go show it off at Ernie's? We haven't gone out to eat in forever and, if Nathan gets his way, we're going to have very few chances to do so in the future."

Lily's face darkened momentarily, but she nodded. "I'll get my purse."

She left the study and Alex re-opened the folder, putting the papers in order before closing it again and dropping a notebook on top. Part of him felt guilty for the subterfuge, but the rest... 

"Ernie's doesn't mind casual, but I'm pretty sure they have a rule about shoes," Lily quipped as Alex met her in the living room. 

He stuck out his tongue and went to go find sneakers.

Dinner was pleasant - Alex was adventurous and ordered something besides his much beloved marinated steak and Lily pronounced the mushroom tortellini worth another go on a subsequent trip and they split a bottle of wine. It was a warm night on the cusp of summer and, on a lark, they walked down Broadway to Lincoln Center and back up, stopping at Café Lalo on the way for coffee and frighteningly large slices of berry tart and raspberry cheesecake. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening. 

Five weeks later, right on schedule, the world as they knew it ended.


	8. August 2005 - February 2006

Lily heard the groan of pain from the living room and got up. "Did the Percocet wear off already?"

A week. It had been only a week since the Merge. A week since reality itself had shuddered like a rickety house on stilts. A week since she had had both her most brilliant and her most harrowing moments, since she'd simultaneously witnessed a scientific epiphany and nearly lost everything that would have made it worthwhile.

"Only the part that actually kills the pain," Alex muttered as she appeared in the study doorway and looked out to where he was on the couch. "I'm still groggy and fuzzy and my mouth is really, really dry."

"Stay there," she told him as he tried to get up to refill his water bottle. "I'll get it."

The injury could have been a lot worse, Lily knew. It _had_ been a lot worse. At least until Dana had grabbed him. Some sort of projectile weapon (it wasn't a gun, it wasn't a harpoon thrower, it was... something that Alex couldn't describe in any useful way and Lily hoped never to see) had found him unprotected and launched a poisoned pike-sized arrow that had had enough force to pass right through bone and muscle. When Dana had found him, he'd had a hole the size of a golf ball clean through his body and his collarbone and shoulder socket were shattered. He was in convulsions from the poison and even without that, he'd have bled to death had Dana not gotten to him when she had.

"I'm fi... really dizzy and going to lie back now," Alex groaned and did just that. "I hate this."

Lily leaned over to kiss him as she retrieved the water bottle. "Well, next time stay away from the booby traps," she said with a lightness that she didn't feel. 

The pike-gun had been at the border of the fortress, the last set of obstacles between them and victory. Alex - Havok - had been one of the horrifyingly small group still on their feet and able to reach that point. Back in the plane with the rest of the field division of the time watchers, Lily had been half-present, her eyes on her work but her attention on the plasma screens showing footage of the fight down below. She'd been listening only for the sound of Havok's voice (which was not much like Alex's, she'd come to appreciate). Because for as long as she heard him barking out commands and passing on Cable's orders, that meant he was still alive. His cry of surprised agony had come clearly through the plane's surround-sound speaker system and Lily was sure she'd go to her grave with its echo in her heart. There'd been no camera footage of the incident at the time; there was now, but she had no desire to ever see it. 

She shook her head to clear her thoughts. She was standing in front of the sink with the water running and staring blankly at the wall. Muttering to herself, she filled the bottle and, taking pity on Alex, cut a sliver out of an orange and squeezed it in, dropping the rind in before twisting on the nipple. 

"Can I do something?" Alex asked as she returned to him. He took the bottle with his right hand, his left still basically immobilized by the harness. Dana could heal muscle and tissue and skin and ligaments perfectly and Alex would have no lasting effects. But bones were harder and while she had aligned everything, they were still knitting a week later. "You've got stuff to do besides coddling me."

"I'm not coddling you," Lily retorted, sitting down on the edge of the coffee table. She reached out to smooth his tousled hair, but he made a face, so she combed it straight up with her fingers and he grinned instead. "I'm keeping you docile so you don't drive me crazy."

"Am I driving you crazy?" he asked, concern making his brow crease. 

The answering machine had been overwhelmed by the time they got home two days after the fight, their cell phones crying out that their voicemail capacities had been reached. But that was the same for everyone whether or not they'd been part of the fight at Akkaba. The planet's population as a whole was calling everyone they knew, checking up on family, friends, long-lost loved ones... Jean and Charles said that it was a by-product of the Merge, this worldwide bout of empathy and good will, but Lily thought it was more a simple matter of human nature. Just checking up was instinct. Both of their email accounts were near capacity as well.

She leaned forward to kiss him and stood up. "No. You're not. Another week like this, and yeah, you'll drive me crazy. But right now, no."

Lily had already called back the important people - her parents, his grandparents - and the two of them together had come up with a neutral-sounding email to send to all of their friends. Neither Lily nor Alex thought that they'd be able to talk to anyone else without having to divulge information. It was easier to write, "we're okay, just a little rattled but we're recovering" than to try to explain to Ji-Won or Sanjay or Orly or Aunt Eleanor or any of the others exactly why Alex sounded like he was in a lot of pain. Alex's employers, on the other hand, got to talk to him. There had been thousands of motor vehicle accidents (among other incidents) at the moment of the Merge and Alex's supervisors were left with the impression that he'd been another of the victims of such.

"Another week like this and _I_ am going to go crazy," Alex grumbled. "I can't cook, I can't type, I have the attention span of a fruit fly, the damned drugs are making me fall asleep at all the wrong times...I'm taking up space."

"You're cute when you take up space," she told him as she headed back to the study.

"I'm going to remind you of that," he called after her.

Back at her desk, Lily flicked her finger at her mouse to make the computer screen saver go away. As she sat down before a screen filled with a 3-D model that anyone in flow theory would recognize, a frisson of nervous energy passed through her. This was ill-gotten booty, purloined in the name of science. Because while the model structure looked familiar, what it was a model of was not. It was the time stream itself. And if the snarling field commander knew that she had copied the data to a flash drive and walked away with it, she'd probably kill her.

Towards the end of the fight, with the echoes of Alex's shout of pain still in her ears, Lily had had to go back to work. The field team in Cable's employ knew how to read the effects, but it was Lily who knew how to predict them sight unseen. Cable had other engineers working for him, but all of them were too reverent, too unable to see the time stream for what it was: just another fluid dynamics problem. For Lily, it was the only way she could work; by pretending it was just another application and not one of the binding forces of the universe. And with the first rule of combat being that there is no simple plan once you're out in the field, Lily's cold and scientific methods were the most reliable.

Havok had been brought down in a balance-shifting exchange that had ended with Apocalypse cornered. As the final conflict escalated, the time stream - visualized by standard fluid dynamics programs - was roiling like white-water rapids, seemingly bucking against the awesome forces that would control it. Lily had written four papers on distortion effects, had taught a graduate level course in turbulent flow... the things that that model of the time stream was doing weren't supposed to be _possible_. Not when the medium in question was water, or even in supersonic streams, and certainly not in time itself. 

With one eye on the monitors displaying the action below in crystal-clear high definition and one eye on the laptop she'd spent most of the past twenty hours attached to, Lily had nearly been overwhelmed by what had come next. The wave of bright light, the model simultaneously pinching in and expanding and re-orienting itself to its new flow, the sounds on the speakers, the acrid smell...And then, so close to the action, right above it really, she had felt reality... tremble. There was no other way to put it. She had been shaken to the core on levels she didn't even know she had. And then it was over. 

Everywhere around her it had seemed that everyone had taken a deep breath and then went on. The steady rush of commands coming over the four different radio channels hadn't ceased, but they had instead changed their tone - from attack to recover. The med squads had swarmed in and any lingering antipathy Lily had for Dana had had to be forgotten because it was the latter's empathetic abilities that had drawn her to the dying Havok. 

In the plane's command center, one group had been tracking changes and Lily had been in charge of coming up with possible correcting factors. It was how they had worked all along - Lily would come up with the mathematically precise answer and someone else would translate that into an event. This time, they had been working on assuring that the time stream itself continued - and continued without influence from Nur.

But as the adrenaline had slowly subsided and the frantic pace had slowed to that which was commensurate with the clean up and securing of a successful mission objective, Lily's mind kept returning to what she had seen. If her dissertation had broken new ground in the theory of border studies and supersonic flow, then this...  She had experienced many things that day that had been considered impossible. But the distortion effects, despite her longstanding lack of interest in computational fluid dynamics, they were the one aspect she'd have a chance at being able to explain. She hadn't been looking for fame or fortune out of this; she saw these things that only gave questions and she had been sure that she could provide answers. 

The phone rang out in the silence, the latest in a long line of interruptions that gnawed at her fragile concentration. She and Alex were screening calls, still unwilling to talk to most people. Not only was it their own situation that had to be danced delicately around, but there was also the increasingly obvious fact that there were lasting emotional effects of the Merge and they weren't sure how any of the people they thought they knew would be affected. The news was full of after-effects - accidents, catastrophes, incidences of sudden and violent insanity - and yet the most overwhelmingly common effect of what had happened in Akkaba was... understanding. The psionic nature of the construct would have lasting and permanent effects, Charles had warned, but not all of them would be negative. Millions of people had experienced the Merge on a personal level and had been affected positively - when the news wasn't showing some horrible event, they were showing spontaneous peaceful rallies in the streets, strangers singing and crying and hugging. 

"Hello?" 

Lily raised an eyebrow. Why was he answering the phone? She got up and took a few steps towards the door, not close enough to be visible, but close enough to eavesdrop. At least so she thought. Alex caught her eyes and mouthed 'Jean' at her. Jean had probably sent a mental message ahead - she did that sometimes.

"How is he... Well, all that Shi'ar stuff's gotta be good for something, right? ...I can imagine. But I do owe her my life, so if she gets too worked up, just remind her that she's got a handful of other people who are waiting to thank her...No... Not really... I don't know what to say, Jean. I know that everyone knew intellectually that he'd be risking his life to do this and that he was fully prepared to die and that doesn't mean that we all can't have our second thoughts and our doubts...No, that's not a surprise... Why don't you send him down here for a few hours? You can't be in the room with Nate anyway... I know you'll have to knock him out to do it, but all he's doing is giving himself an ulcer and getting underfoot. He's not being productive... Because I'm doing the same thing except for the ulcer part. We can be trapped on our own couches annoying the hell out of each other like we did when we got chicken pox together when we were kids... Yeah, I am... Because I care about you... Yeah... I'm serious, Jean... All right... Yeah. Call whenever... Don't do that, my wife is watching me... Love you, too."

Alex put the phone down. "We're not missing anything at the mansion," he said. "Scott and Jean are wearing holes in the floor worrying about Nathan, Logan's finally stopped looking like road kill, and everyone else is more or less in the same shape we're in."

Lily watched the bewildered expression creep back onto his face. He'd look like that whenever he thought too much about what had happened. While Lily had had nothing to do but think about things - and she had not used that time wisely, choosing to lose herself in the science rather than deal with her emotions - Alex had had to be the man of action and not think about it at all until it was all over, at which point he had been drugged senseless. And now, with the waves of realization crashing over him, Lily just wanted to make sure he didn't drown.

She went over to the couch and patted Alex's feet so that he'd move them. He sat up and she sat down next to him and he put his undamaged right arm around her and they leaned back together and just sat. Holding on to each other as they hadn't been able to do on that day, as they had taken to doing quite often since then. Staying in close proximity with each other so that they wouldn't be left alone with their thoughts. Lily didn't want to seem needy, not when it was Alex who was the one recovering, but she very much wanted to bury herself in the warmth of his embrace.

* * *

"I brought it back from Mexico."

"I suspected as much. I've never seen something like this at the duty-free shops in Newark... What is it?"

"Umm... It's a ceremonial vessel. At least it's a reproduction of a ceremonial vessel."

"Well, it's good that you're not filching artifacts... Why is there a red splotch on the bottom?"

"It's a heart."

"So it is... Remarkably realistic. Not Valentine's Day-ish at all."

"Yeah, that's what I thought when I saw it."

"So... Why is there a heart at the bottom of the ceremonial vessel?"

"It's sort of a 'insert heart here' mark."

"This is a reproduction of a vessel used in _human sacrifice_?"

"Umm... Yeah?"

"They _make_ reproductions of things like this? You _bought_ one?"

"Actually, it was given to me. I helped out the guy who sold them at his stand. He blew out an axle on his cart and I sort of welded it back on. But I had been admiring it the day before. He was selling them at a ridiculous price. I could have bought a real one for not that much more. But he just gave me this one."

"What are you planning on using this for, dare I ask?"

"Well, my blue coffee mug's got a chip... Actually, I was thinking it would be a nice pencil cup for you."

"Am I supposed to be looking for symbolism in that?"

"You don't have to."

* * *

"Don't make a mess," Lily called from the living room. 

"I'm not going to make a mess," Alex grumbled as he poured the popcorn kernels. "I've been doing this for a dozen years."

He absently held one glowing hand over the bowl and reached for the salt with the other. Bobby had gotten them the bowl - it was an actual kettle for kettle corn, a vessel with a flat bottom and tall sides that would let Alex do his thing without getting popcorn all over the place. 

He poured the now-salted popcorn into a plastic bowl and turned the kettle over the sink and banged on it, making sure all of the little bits were out. Before Lily could holler for him to remember napkins, he tossed a few on top and nearly knocked over the Valentine's Day cards Lily had put on the end of the counter to display. He frowned at the cards - why she wanted them there, he didn't know - and got a couple of bottles of root beer out of the fridge. Taking the bowl with one hand and the bottles with the other, he went into the living room. 

Lily was sitting on the couch, feet up on the coffee table. She had already opened up the oak cabinet that hid the television and was switching channels. Contrary to popular opinion regarding men and remote controls, Lily was actually the more dangerous of the two with the clicker. She muted commercials ("I feel like I'm deaf when I watch television with you!") and could speed-surf better than any guy he had ever known. 

"You didn't bring glasses," she accused as he sat down. 

He mock-glared at her. "I'm sorry. My mutant abilities go only so far as to make popcorn. I don't have telekinesis and I don't have extra hands."

"We'll drink out of the bottles, then," Lily said airily, going back to channel changing. 

Today was The Day. It was the day that SHIELD had announced that it would give details to clarify the curious events of the previous August. The Merge may have been felt by almost everyone on the planet, but it had gone unexplained since then. Six months of stalling, prevaricating, and harshly-phrased media statements would come to an end. And the world was watching. 

Alex knew that the X-Men were as involved with this as they had been with the original events - SHIELD was there basically as a figurehead, the curtain behind which the X-Men wizards did their work. Charles was going to be doing most of the talking. Scott, Jean, Ororo and Logan would be there as well and Nathan, the real power behind the throne, would be hooked in via teleconferencing. Six months had done wonders for his physical condition - it had taken a month alone just to improve the odds of his survival from 'perhaps' to 'probable' - but not to his psionic health. As a result, Nathan was about to move to the settlement in Antarctica (leaving Domino and their baby daughter Clare behind) to ease the rehabilitation of his shattered shields and uncontrollable powers.

"It's supposed to start at two?" he asked as Lily cycled past the sports networks - all showing college sports - and a few of the public access channels. 

"Yup."

"So I have fifteen minutes more of you doing the 'Clockwork Orange' thing with the remote?"

"Yup."

Fifteen minutes of surfing later - after Lily had made Alex whimper by pausing on the home shopping channel that was showing off what was arguably the world's ugliest jewelry - she put down the remote. Almost every channel save the Food Network and the Cartoon Network was showing the conference, so he wasn't sure which station they were watching. It started off with Nick Fury reading a prepared statement, GW Bridge standing behind his right shoulder looking implacable and grim. It ended with Nathan (looking much less fragile on video than he did in real life) telling the people of the world that their fate was finally in their own hands and to make the most of their choices. And somewhere in the middle, Charles did the unthinkable.

"What?" Alex had squeaked when Charles had announced that the X-Men would no longer be hiding, that their actions in August had earned them the right to not live as fugitives, and they would now operate out in the open. It had been part of a larger discussion of the sharp rise in mutant births and especially of telepathic children that Xavier spoke of a new understanding required of the citizens of the world. The X-Men were no longer 'freaks of nature' - nature had started to balance the playing field. Alex had nearly dropped his root beer.  "Did he just... And Scott's not... Were they replaced with Skrulls since we saw them last? What's going on?!"

"Scott and Jean _did_ say that there were going to be some radical changes introduced," Lily reminded him and Alex frowned at her apparent lack of distress that his secret life was now possibly no longer secret. 

All in all and once he'd calmed down, Alex thought it was a very good presentation. Charles had been in fine form; at his best, he'd go in with a definite plan, phrase it entirely in terms of suggestions and offers to help, and come away with exactly what he wanted. Charles had spoken of the spike in mutant births as a gift, had offered the Xavier Institute as a training ground and volunteered to spearhead a think tank that would come up with proposals to accommodate the needs of these special children and the ones that would most definitely follow. But Alex still wasn't sure of what to make of the whole 'operating out in the open' thing - and he wasn't sure of how much of his doubt came from the possible stripping away of his own comfort zone. 

They watched the news programs that immediately followed the conference, switching back and forth as Charles, Scott, and Ororo did television interviews. The X-Men provided a united front - focusing on their good deeds, on past occasions of saving the universe, and on how they could just as easily channel their combat skills into education ones and be able to teach as well as defend. Alex's heart nearly burst with pride as Scott spoke eloquently to the Fox questioner and smiled as Charles lectured to the CNN interview panel on the immediate need for pediatricians and obstetricians to be retrained to deal with mutant children, especially those who manifested at birth. They only caught a bit of Ororo's answer on training Red Cross and other humanitarian agencies to deal with the mutant birth spike in third-world nations - as well as making sure that they realized that groups of mutant outcasts (i.e, the Morlocks) were really no different than any of the other disenfranchised. 

Alex blinked when the television suddenly turned off. He looked at Lily, who was holding the remote. 

"We've been watching television for six hours straight," she told him seriously as she stood up and stretched. "Our asses are numb, our brains are numb, and we're not going to process any of this information if we keep receiving it. If you have any questions, I'm pretty sure Scott or Ororo or Charles would answer them."

He looked at his watch. It was a quarter past eight. "Heh," he muttered. It certainly hadn't felt like that much time while it was on, but now he could feel the weight of it all begin to settle. "All right."

"Let's walk down to Citarella's or Zabar's or something and pick out fancy food for dinner," Lily suggested. "Get some circulation back in the lower half of our bodies and all that. Get some air."

They got dressed for the February evening and walked down Broadway. It was a Saturday night in Manhattan and the streets were crowded. It was the middle of the dinner hour and Alex heard people scurrying towards restaurants talking about one thing and one thing only. Mutants and what SHIELD said had happened in Egypt. Citarella's, the longer walk of the two options, wasn't too crowded despite the hour. There was a lovely piece of fresh marlin to be had for a less than their mortgage, the vegetables looked reasonably fresh, and the gourmet floor had the brand of brie that one of Alex's museum friends had raved so much about. 

It wasn't until after dinner that Alex again thought about what he had seen that afternoon. 

The whole idea of being out in the open - of the X-Men being just another profession, of having a real life that didn't have to be kept strictly separate... this was what they had all dreamed about, from Scott to Alison. It was what they spoke of in wistful phrases and uncompleted sentences that would trail off and yet still be understood, be they in Westchester or Australia or any place in between. But it was an impossible dream, like Don Quixote's. The world wasn't ready to accept mutants, either as neighbor or savior. And so their hopes, like their real names, were kept buried. And for some of them, the need to feel connected to the 'real' world got too strong. It was why he had left, why Alison had left, why Warren had left, why Logan went walkabout... It wasn't about the dishonesty of leading a secret life. It was about the claustrophobia. 

Alex had found his middle ground - his work, his academic life, his friends and his mundane existence as a poor man's Indiana Jones. The X-Men were still there - and his shoulder ached once in a while to prove it - and Lily was the binding force that held all of it - and him - together. Alex didn't need Charles Xavier daring the world to pillory its heroes for wanting to live among those they had saved. He had done it on his own, in his own fashion. 

Alex had always wanted to be more than Havok, even if it had taken him years to realize that that 'more' didn't mean losing Havok in the process. And there was a little voice in the back of his head telling him that yes, he was in fact feeling resentment towards Charles for... for what? For removing all of the obstacles from the path that had been so hard for Alex to traverse? For possibly making Alex's life more difficult now by erasing all of the distance between him and the X-Men? Did he have a right to be upset? Was he being ungrateful or merely unhappy that he was the minority that would sacrifice for the majority? Scott deserved any happiness he could get and Alex hated himself for even indirectly resenting his brother. 

"You know, at some point down the line," Lily began as she dropped down next to him on the couch, "You're going to have to decide when to tell people. Because eventually it's going to come out. Either that you're a mutant or that you're Havok.  SHIELD is going to release parts of the footage, they said, and it's going to be a lot worse if everyone hears it from Brian Williams and not you."

"I know," Alex admitted, running his hands over his face. It had been a long day. "I... I just want to see where this goes. If everything works even part of the way Charles and Nathan want it to work, then we'll have a big 'let's out Alex' party. But if there's a big backlash, then...I don't want to put you at risk."

"I'm stuck with you no matter what, Summers," Lily told him without a trace of humor. 

"Don't even imagine that I don't appreciate that," he told her, pulling her close. 


	9. April 2006

"So how is Ji-Won?" Lily asked Alex as he came back into the study. He had been there consulting a reference book when his cell phone had rung and once he'd realized who it was, he'd gone into the bedroom to talk. 

"She's got a job," Alex replied, sitting down at his desk. The study was really Lily's study, he'd freely admit to anyone. They both had the same sized desks and the same number of bookshelves, but it was Lily who worked here, not him. He used a laptop precisely for its mobility and had always been more comfortable sprawled out on the couch or the bed or any other surface rather than confined to a desk. His half of the study was really just storage space.

"Really? That's great. Where?" Lily asked, sounding interested even though she didn't look up from her computer. 

"New Lands Mining Corporation," Alex replied, watching Lily closely to see if there was a reaction. There was. 

Lily stopped what she was doing and looked up. "New Lands? As in 'New Lands'?"

"Yeah," Alex confirmed. The New Lands had been recognized by the UN only two weeks ago, although they had been declaring their sovereignty as a nation for much longer. The former Antarctic base of Magneto was now its own country, a fact that in and of itself was amusing as hell to Alex. That Ororo had just left the X-Men to go be with Remy, who was _helping run_ the place, was just icing on the cake. "She's going to head up one of their survey units."

The New Lands were new in more than just UN status. They were the first majority-mutant nation to live as a free democracy - the apartheid of pre-revolution Genosha did not go unremembered - and boasted a six-to-one mutant-to-non population ratio. Essentially a giant network of biospheres, the New Lands were a city-state created for and by mutants. 

"That's...interesting," Lily mused, leaning back. "I don't think I would have even applied for the job were it me."

"There's a shortage of mutant metallurgy experts," Alex said sarcastically and frowned. There was a great suspicion attached to the New Lands - that they would be an anti-human nation, one that would only grow in power as the rate of mutant births continued to grow geometrically in the eight months since Akkaba and would explode in the coming months with the already-much-talked-about baby boom. Lily, despite being so close to the whole process, was still not free of such suspicions and that annoyed Alex to no end. He knew she had heard her father's stories of the horrors of the Genoshan Revolution and knew that the concept of payback hadn't evolved out of human nature even with mutants. But still. "Well, Ji-Won's always been the accepting type," he finally said. 

"What's that supposed to mean?" Lily asked with some irritation. "Don't start picking a fight with me over that now, Alex, please? We've agreed that I'm being mildly hypocritical and mostly irrational and holding me up against the paragon of neutrality that Ji-Won has always been is not going to accomplish anything."

"Fine," Alex replied, standing back up. "But Ji-Won did invite us up to visit once she gets settled and, coupled with Ororo's offer, we really are going to have to make a trip up there. So you're going to have to come to terms with everything sooner or later."

"I will," Lily grumbled, turning back to her computer. "Just indulge me in my paranoia for a little bit."

"I have been," Alex retorted without sympathy. "Speaking of, Scott wants me up at the mansion this weekend to run around and get shot at. Do you want to come and we'll stay there or am I commuting? Nate should be around if you want to talk turkey with him; he's better, but I don't think he's going to be wandering too far from Domino and Clare."

As a rule, while Alex could appreciate chatter about basic engineering and physics matters, he didn't ask for too-detailed explanations for what Lily did in fluid dynamics - he didn't understand and she tended to get frustrated with having to put in plain words things she thought he should know.

"We can go up," Lily said with a shrug. "I haven't seen anyone since Ororo's farewell dinner. And maybe talk a little turkey with Nathan..."

Alex snorted. Lily had been close to obsessed with whatever project had sprung out of her work at Akkaba. She had been positively secretive about it to her colleagues and even to the folks up in Westchester. It had something to do with the time stream and it was something he suspected that she wasn't supposed to be working on - at least as far as Cable's network went. Hence the secrecy - along with proving that the X-Men were up to the challenge of facing Apocalypse, Akkaba also proved just how pervasive Cable's network's reach actually was. 

"I'll call Scott later," he said and headed back to his workspace - currently, the couch and coffee table. 

Once Alex sat down, he remembered that he hadn't actually looked up what he had been in the study looking up when Ji-Won had called and got back up, muttering to himself about turning into a senile old man. 

Lily was squinting at the monitor - Alex was starting to suspect that she needed glasses - and clicking furiously with her mouse. It looked like she was trying to freeze-frame something on one of her demo programs. Not wanting to disturb her - or be accused of messing with her trigger finger - he opened up the book he needed and found his answer without saying anything. 

Alex had finished two pages of painstakingly detailed analysis of the first set of test results he had gotten in Labrador the previous week when the phone rang again. Once, twice, and just when he was about to let the answering machine pick up, he heard Lily do so instead. A moment later, she hollered his name. 

"I'll get it in the kitchen," he called out, heading in that direction. He picked up the phone as he sat down and heard Lily hang up as he said hello.

"Alex? It's Steve." 

Steve Rahouli was the guy who had the cubicle next to Alex's in the cramped office at the Museum. Steve, unlike Alex, was a full-timer there, a geologist - a mineralogist, to be precise - who had moved over into editing a decade ago when he realized that knowing how to spot subject-verb agreement would pay him more than knowing both the Strunz and the Dana classifications backwards and forwards. 

"Heya. What's up?"

Alex had no idea why Steve was calling him at home. He had no idea Steve knew his home phone number - Alex had left his cell phone as his contact point... of course, his cell was currently turned off right now... 

"Umm... Someone left you a... practical joke on your desk," Steve said in a cautious voice. "I know you're not coming in until Thursday, so I just wanted to ask if I should do anything about it..."

Alex made a face. Why would he care? The office was very laid back - jeans and shorts were permissible, desk decorations encouraged - and if someone had bothered with a practical joke, then who was Alex to spoil the fun by having it short-circuited. And why would Steve - a man known to switch the salt and the sugar by the table where they kept the coffee maker - even want to offer? "Ahh. What is it that you don't think I should face in person?"

"It's a giant picture of Havok," Steve explained. "You know that guy from the X-Men? It's a picture of him fighting at Akkaba - he's got his hands glowing and everything. A screencap from the SHIELD footage, I think. Anyway, it's got a big caption that reads 'What Alex _really_ did on his vacation.' And I didn't know whether you'd want me to get rid of it at the end of the day or something, you know, make it seem like maintenance had taken it down."

Alex felt his heart drop into his stomach and stay there. "You know what?" he asked in a voice that he hoped sounded normal. "Leave it there. Make sure it's firmly fastened."

"You don't care?" Steve asked incredulously. "I mean, that's going to be two days of everyone getting to see it. You're going to be getting called 'Havok' for months."

"I've been called worse," Alex replied. "Listen, I was on my way out the door. I'll catch you at work on Thursday, okay?"

"Deal," Steve agreed. "And I gotta tell you, you're much more tolerant about this sort of crap than I would be. I'd flip."

"You just might anyway," Alex muttered to himself.

"Pardon?"

"Lily was asking me something," Alex lied. "All right. Thanks for calling."

He hung up the phone without standing up and just sat there, unmoving. He wasn't sure how long he had been sitting there when he looked up and saw Lily watching him.

"You okay? Work okay?" she asked him, leaning against the kitchen entryway. 

"I don't know," he replied, feeling a little bewildered. "I've dithered and dithered and now the choice has been taken out of my hands."

"What are you talking about?" Lily asked, pushing off of the wall and coming to sit next to him at the table. "That Steve person, he's the one we met at the movies, right?"

"Yeah," Alex said vaguely as he turned to face her. "He called to tell me that someone had put a picture of Havok up on my cubicle wall and did I want him to take it down before people started calling me a mutant."

"I'm gathering that he implied that that would be a very bad thing," Lily commented and Alex could hear the steel in her voice. It was one thing for her to be mildly uncomfortable about a mutant nation being the most technologically advanced in the world, it was another for someone else to openly prove themselves a bigot. Lily admitted she was being paranoid; she didn't want to tolerate any self-delusions in others. 

"Yeah, I'm gathering that too," Alex agreed. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. "I guess it's time, then."

Time for what he didn't say, but he knew Lily knew. They had talked on and off since Akkaba about telling their friends that he was a mutant, even if he didn't say that he was Havok. Lily was in favor of him telling people - she saw how uncomfortable he was when the topic of mutants came up, as it had constantly since last August, and he had had to keep quiet lest he be forced to lie outright. 

"The longer you wait," she told him with the air of someone repeating something for the thousandth time, "The harder it's going to be. Ji-Won is going to be moving to the New Lands and you didn't even tell her that you not only are you on first name bases with President Lehnsherr and Vice-President Lebeau, but you have also seen almost the entire Cabinet in their underwear at some point or another. Paul and Stephanie are completely preoccupied with whether they're going to become parents of a mutant in two months...You are long overdue to be telling the people you've known for years. But don't let that asshole from work force your hand."

"He already has," Alex retorted, reaching out and playing with the pepper mill idly. 

"Why?" Lily asked seriously. "If you don't want to tell everyone at work, then don't. Be enigmatic. You're really good at it."

"That's not a compliment," he pointed out.

"I'm just finding a positive use for your negative trait," Lily told him dismissively, waving her hand vaguely as if the put-down wasn't really the point. And, Alex supposed, it wasn't. "If you're enigmatic, then nobody will know what to say and they won't say anything. If they ask, you can choose to answer or not."

"You make it sound so simple," Alex muttered, putting down the pepper mill when he realized he was making a mess.

"It is simple," Lily replied, standing up by leaning on his arm. She kissed the top of his head. "This is not the first time someone's thought you've looked like Havok. This doesn't have to be the first time you can't come up with a way to get out of divulging more than you want to."

With that, she left him to his thoughts. 

Alex knew that he didn't want to tell everyone at work that he was Havok. Not because he was now assured of at least one negative reaction, but because... Being Havok was an integral part of his life, but it wasn't who he was all of the time. Almost all of the time, he was just Alex. Alex, freelance geologist for the Museum of Natural History. Alex, researcher for the Lamont-Doherty Laboratories Geosciences B-Group. Alex, husband of Lily, brother of Scott, son of Christopher, uncle of Nathan, great-uncle of Clare, grandson of Philip and Deborah. He would be all of those things even if he had never heard of the X-Men. Perhaps he would be less of them were he not Havok as well, but... He wasn't in the same situations as the others were - Scott didn't have to tell the world that he was Cyclops; instead Cyclops wanted the world to know that there was a Scott. Scott and Jean and the others wanted a chance at a real life - forcing the public to accept that superheroes go to the supermarket was part of their attempt to assure that chance. But Alex had a real life and saw no reason to announce his secret one to anyone who didn't directly need to know.

But Lily was right about his friends needing to know. He had known she was right for a long time but had been too lazy and too unsure of how to do it to actually go through with telling them. But that could change; that would change. 

Alex went back to the coffee table to get his little notebook and flipped to the page where he wrote down phone numbers he didn't have the patience to input into his cell phone. Ororo was settled in the New Lands already - she had sent digital pictures of her new home with Remy two days previous, but Alex hadn't changed his contact list on his phone yet. She picked up on the third ring and Alex got the latest updates (she and Remy had spent the morning moving the couches around and Radha had nearly convinced her father that she was ready for a bike with training wheels) before asking her for a favor. Ororo was delighted to accommodate - both because Alex was a friend and because of the simple fact that she was as eager as everyone else was to make the world at large realize that non-mutants were as welcome as mutants in the New Lands. 

Inspiration struck as Ororo was telling him about her annoyance at having to get ready for her first state dinner (the president of Australia was visiting) and after getting off the phone with her, Alex headed into the study. 

"Ororo sends her greetings," Alex said and Lily looked up and nodded, smiling knowingly. "She thinks you're right about the painting in the living room, but Remy's very partial to it and she's letting him win. I wanted to know what you thought of inviting everyone over on Friday night. Sanjay, Ji-Won, Stephanie and Paul, Orly, Xiao, and the rest... and Scott and Jean."

Lily leaned back in her chair. "Your call," she told him, not giving any sort of reaction one way or the other. 

"If we do this, then Scott and Jean can stay over and we'll all go up together on Saturday morning," Alex reasoned. As if that was the only consideration. 

"You want Scott around for support or for socializing?" 

"Both," Alex admitted, smiling wryly. He dusted off the top of the pencil sharpener with his fingers. "Orly and Scott get along well, though. And he and Jean can talk to Paul and Stephanie about babies."

"Oh, yeah," Lily snorted. "Bringing up the possibility of giving birth to Cable is _just_ what any prospective parent wants to hear."

Alex laughed. "True." 

Thursday morning, Alex showed up at the Museum and greeted Steve the same way he did every day that he showed up at the Museum. The picture of him in battle was a good one - someone had obviously taken time to make the screencap and not simply copied the first image that they found. Havok was in full fighting mode - face intense (Alex thought he looked mildly constipated), dramatic battle pose achieved, both his hands were glowing and he was firing plasma with his left hand at an unseen target. It was a close shot, but not perfectly clear. If you knew it was Alex, then there was nobody else you'd even think to imagine it was. But if you just thought it was some generic athletic blond guy, then it was kind of hard to look at it and then look at him and be sure of anything more than a strong resemblance. It was an aerial view, but it was too low to the ground to have been a shot from either plane or helicopter. Alex assumed it was by one of the tiny repulsor video cameras that SHIELD used - almost all of them had gotten fried in the fighting, but before they had, there had been some great footage shot. 

Alex put the picture up with thumbtacks on a cubicle wall that was easily visible to anyone passing by - right next to his periodic chart and a hydromorphic map of Alaska and right above the list of commands for the software that the museum used for cataloging new artifacts. Steve stopped by on his way to the coffee pot and muttered about how a joke was a joke, but he didn't find being called a mutant (let alone a mutant terrorist who had killed hundreds of people) very funny. Two other people noticed - Rageep spent a good two minutes looking at Alex and looking at the picture before smiling, shaking his head, and walking away without saying a word; Juana stared intently at the picture for a moment, then looked at Alex, who watched her eyes go wide. Alex held his finger to his lip as if asking for silence and Juana looked at him cock-eyed for a moment, then smiled and nodded and went away. If anyone else noticed, nobody else cared to ask.

Friday night, Ji-Won showed up half an hour early bearing the fruits of her adventures into Sunnyside and the Korean supermarket. She handed the bags to Lily, then walked over to Alex and punched him in the arm. Hard. Ji-Won had been mortified when it turned out that it _wasn't_ a practical joke and the President of the New Lands was in fact calling her (after finding out from Ororo Munro that she was a close friend of Alex's) to welcome her to their nation and ask if she needed any help in either finding a place to live or arranging for the still-necessary medical exams required of anyone entering the country.

Spilling the beans wasn't as hard as Alex thought it would be. The presence of Scott and Jean made everything easier - Valeri recognized Jean right away and by the time Alex got around to clinking a glass and asking for attention, Sanjay interrupted his planned speech and just asked him which of the X-Men he was. The general reaction was one of muted surprise - reconciling Alex with Havok was almost as hard for them as it had been for Lily four years previously - but no hostility. 

Later on, Lily would point out to him that he had initially chosen his friends for their attitudes and personalities and would hardly have become enduringly close with anyone who was very much anti-mutant. Orly had broken out in laughter and then cracked the room up with her litany of all of the various attempts Lily had made to explain Alex's... peculiarities. Stephanie - an expert in high temperature refining - had accused Alex of not being any help in grad school when she had needed to do endless trials on her research paper on bauxite grading. Paul, who had spent grad school implying that Alex was a Delta Force operative, had gone right back into his conversation with Jean about mutant babies - his younger brother had a two-year-old who was x-factor positive and Stephanie's cousin was a gamma-class empath and they were sure that their child would be a mutant of some sort. Valeri and Sanjay had suggested Alex make dinner with his powers and Scott had merely told Alex to get him another beer. 

The following day, Alex lost his wife to his nephew - Lily and Nathan had almost immediately disappeared and had had to be telepathically summoned from their apparently rather intense discussion for dinner. Sunday, he and Bobby and Hank acquitted themselves very well against Scott and Logan - at least until Sulven had joined in and knocked them over like bowling pins. 

Monday morning, life was almost back to normal.


	10. August 2006

"Wow."

"Umm... yeah, that about covers it," Alex agreed as he came up behind Lily, putting his arms around her. 

She leaned back against him as they looked up at the skyline. Or at least the area where the repulsor-supported infrastructure ended and the anti-grav began. It was a little like being the diver-toy in a household fish tank - the ground below you seemed a little less than firm, the air itself seemed to sway slightly, and the buildings around you sort of floated in place. It was unnerving and wonderful and crazy all at once and Lily rued every moment she had ever had any doubts about coming here.

"How are you feeling?" he added, squeezing her tense-from-immobility-and-luggage shoulders. She squeaked in pain and he loosed his grip.

"Less nauseous," she told him. To get a visa to enter the New Lands, an individual had to submit to a medical exam, including several vaccinations. The New Lands were basically a network of biospheres - infection of any major sort could wreak havoc on a level not seen since the Colonial period. Lily had reacted poorly to the last series of shots and had spent the long plane ride sleeping off the antihistamines Cecilia had suggested she take. "Although the floating architecture is going to give me seasickness if we don't get moving quickly."

"You sort of get used to it," Ji-Won told them cheerfully as she joined the pair carrying a small box and some papers, half of which she handed to Alex. "And it's worse here in Aliyah than it is out in the provs."

"Provs?" 

"Provinces," Ji-Won explained with a shrug that meant that she was admitting that she had forgotten she was talking to non-locals. "What we call the farthest of the outlying districts. The distant bubbles. We're all one big city-state family now, but if the population keeps growing like it is, the Council is going to have to split all of the districts into cities in their own right. And then they really will be provinces. So we're just getting ahead of ourselves a little."

The name 'Aliyah' had been chosen by founder Magneto, then as now ignorant of the name of Nathan Summers' deceased wife, from the Hebrew. There were a lot of symbolic references to Israel in the New Lands' founding and evolution, Lily had realized. It made sense, she supposed. 

Behind her, Alex cackled. "Geez. You've been here two months and you're already sounding like you've been here two years," he said with bemused sarcasm. 

"There aren't that many people here still," Ji-Won explained as she gestured for them to follow her. "And after coming from a lifetime in New York City, it's really easy to get the lay of the land down. Even this Land."

Lily smiled. Every communication that they had gotten from Ji-Won since she had moved up here in June had seemed unbelievably happy. She was working, she was exploring, she was dating this really great Korean guy who had purple hair without dying it. There was no mention of any anti-BH ('baseline human', the current politically correct term for 'non mutant') sentiment and, if anything, she had said that the greatest of the not-very-great resentment came between alpha-class and gamma-class mutants and not the non-mutants. 

They turned the corner and Lily could see the sign for the car rental place. Yes, Hertz had made it to Antarctica. The clerk at the counter seemed to recognize Alex when gave his name and while Lily could tell that Alex was getting a little irritated at the constant attention, she doubted the clerk could. 

It had started at Customs and Immigration, when the officer processing them had looked positively drop-jawed. After recovering, she had explained that while the list of names of everyone who had fought at Akkaba was on the Wall of Heroes in Harmony Square, because of the rigorous processes involved in simply visiting the country it was pretty much well known when any of them were on their way. And Alex, as one of the X-Men (Alex had raised an eyebrow at that), was accorded a special place of honor. That, and Vice President Lebeau had authorized the visa himself. ("I'm going to kill Remy and 'Ro," Alex had muttered, much to the amused horror of the customs agent.)

"You have a choice, sir," the clerk said upon returning to his station. "You can either get a standard vehicle or you can try out one of our new hybrid cars. Normally we offer a discount on the hybrid cars, but, well, you're here for the Anniversary and we're running that promotion..."

Lily smiled as Alex groaned. They were going to be in the New Lands for the first anniversary of the Merge (Lily really didn't think that Alex had fully contemplated when they made their plans just how much attention he'd be getting) and lots of places were having Anniversary Sales and promotional events. Hertz was offering free one-week rentals to any veteran of Akkaba. 

"What's the hybrid car?" Alex asked, sounding slightly pained. 

"The Council's got a working agreement with a few automakers to produce cars that can be powered by certain kinds of alpha-class mutants," Ji-Won explained from where she was sitting next to Lily on the bench. "So far it's just energy producers and telekinetics and people who can manipulate natural forces like wind and water and magnetism - which is like, what, a couple of dozen people in the whole world? - but they're working on both extending it to gamma-class mutants with those abilities as well as trying to come up with new powers they can harness. Kyung says that they're trying to figure out how to tap people with force fields."

"Interesting," Alex mused, clearly impressed. "But I don't want to have to do all of the driving this week and I don't want Lily to have to be tied to me in case she wants to go somewhere on her own."

"Oh, that's why they're hybrids," the clerk chirped happily. "They can be run on standard batteries. They'd never get rented often enough to make them worthwhile otherwise."

Lily watched Alex, sure that he was going to opt for the hybrid car. If he didn't, she would. She vaguely remembered reading an article in a magazine while up at the mansion about energy resources in the New Lands. Because of the enclosed nature of the place, the New Lands had the strictest pollution laws on the planet and fossil fuels were all but prohibited - cars, lawnmowers, and everything else had to be powered by electricity or magnetism or some other source. Well before Akkaba or their attempts to win a place on the world stage, the New Lands had attracted many of the world's best engineers because of its needs and the results had been spectacular - the fields of windmills that harnessed the fierce arctic air, the solar panels, the day-to-day maintenance, protection, and expansion of immense, habitable biospheres...

"Well, I guess I'm somewhat obligated to try it out," Alex agreed with a wry smile. "These things aren't going to blow up on me if I can't gauge the power requirements, right?"

"The ones we have are Hondas," the clerk told him with happy assurance. "They're very reliable. And after the beta testing that these puppies go through... I heard that Councilwoman Munro powers her with lightning."

"Oh, the mental images one gets with that," Lily muttered with a sigh. Alex laughed. 

When the car was brought around, Lily was amused to note that it really didn't look like it was any different from normal. Well, at least a normal weird car. The roof was a solar panel (Lily was thankful - the magnet-driven cars looked like they had beanies on their roofs) and the clerk explained where the plug was so that they could re-charge the battery at night. He then showed Alex how the steering wheel was covered with conductive patches so that all he'd have to do to power the car himself was simply hold on. 

Watching Alex try to drive literally on his own power was enough to reduce both Ji-Won and Lily to helpless tears. The car started and stopped jerkily, first because Alex wasn't giving it enough energy and then because he gave it too much and left skid marks before he shot across the lot and slammed on the brakes.

"Not a word out of either of you two," Alex told them sternly after he had gotten out, wagging his finger. He then looked over at the somehow-straightfaced clerk. "I hope this cures you of any lingering idol worship."

"If it makes you feel better, President Lehnsherr himself got three speeding tickets before he learned how to drive these models," the clerk offered helpfully. "And those were just the ones he insisted the officers write him up on and not the countless ones he got away with."

"It doesn't make me feel better," Alex told him cheerfully. "Magnus has always liked fast cars. The novelty of the hybrids was just a cover."

Lily was utterly unsurprised when Alex told Ji-Won that she should drive the car to her place - Ji-Won had been dropped off at Ilyana Airfield by her boyfriend Kyung on his way to work and had left her car at home. The drive took about twenty minutes - Ji-Won lived on the other side of the Big Bubble that was the de facto capital of the New Lands. 

While Alex and Ji-Won caught up, Lily was grateful that she got the chance to just stare out the window. They were driving along Route 1, which all three agreed looked very much like the similarly named road back in New Jersey ("This Route 1 has about the same traffic as Route 1 does to the bridge. Especially for the afternoon rush," Ji-Won groused). It was a four-lane, two-way highway at grade with the street, passing through what looked to be the government district and the financial center before breaking out into residential-looking blocks filled with hydroponics and homes that looked one part Jetsons and one part Swiss Family Robinson. There was a lot of thirty-eighth century technology in use here (although most people just thought it another brilliant success of the early engineering boom) and probably quite a bit of its architecture. The buildings were all aerodynamic and rocket-like even as they had sky-walks and connected balconies and some of them were accented to look almost Victorian. 

Ji-Won lived on the second floor of a four-story building, a zigzag shaped structure that only had two apartments per floor at each of the three entryways. The entire building was supported about a foot off the ground by massive repulsors (the magnetic force used to manipulate the earth's own polarity was easy enough to play with, Lily knew, but the real challenge was in amplifying it without knocking people's fillings out when they walked in front of the generators) and some sort of ground ivy grew around and underneath the building. There were hydroponic flowers and trees, but no grass. 

"We can't really grow grass here," Ji-Won explained as she watched them look around. "The soil won't support it. Which is really weird in its own way - grass is one of the heartiest plants on earth, you know? - but, well... The Botanics people have apparently tried a few different varieties and they've had success in some of the other bubbles, but Aliyah has almost no grass."

Inside, the apartment looked very similar to the one Ji-Won had had in Hoboken before she had moved. Korean artwork - including the scroll Lily and Alex had gotten her from the Metropolitan Museum of Art after she had graduated - mixed with simple, functional furnishings. Despite the simple beauty of the rooms - Ji-Won had good taste - the place looked almost mundane after the exotic weirdness of the outdoors. 

Lunch was low-key and both Alex and Lily spent much of the afternoon sleeping off their jet lag. Even without the stopover in Sydney, it had been a ridiculously long flight. Lily had thought that she'd have been wired from the antihistamines, but she wasn't and the next thing she knew, Alex was shaking her shoulder gently. 

"It's time to get up," he said gently, letting his hand linger on her arm. "We have to get ready to go to the Presidential Residence soon."

Lily mumbled and rolled away from Alex and on to her stomach. She wanted to go back to sleep, but knew that she couldn't. Dinner with the Cabinet and all. 

* * *

"You hear that?"

Lily looked at her husband like he was losing it. And, considering the giddy way Alex had been acting since they'd started hiking that morning, she wasn't half convinced might actually be the case.

 "We're in the middle of nowhere," she told him tartly as she tried not to stumble over an exposed tree root. "With heavy packs on our backs and rocks in our shoes. Apart from the whispers of what soon will be the screaming voices telling me to push you over the nearest ledge if we don't stop soon, I don't hear a thing."

"Exactly," Alex told her with a relieved-and-aggrieved sigh that was too heartfelt to even consider her complaints. "The only mammals making noise are us and the happy little woodland creatures."

Lily shook her head to keep from envisioning a cartoon Alex standing next to Bambi and Thumper. All right. Maybe she was the one losing it.

They had been in the New Lands eight days. The first six had been dedicated to social activities in Aliyah and the surrounding areas ("dog and pony shows mixed in with meeting old friends," Alex had groused) and the last two had been spent exploring. Lily had been right - Alex had very much underestimated the attention he was going to be subject to in the New Lands and he had grown more and more tense with each situation. He hadn't ever snapped or even pouted, but Lily could tell that his smiles before the crowds were more and more forced. And they were both weirded out by the autograph requests. Magnus (and boy, did it feel _weird_ to be on a first name basis with Magneto) had completely understood when they had begged off from spending the days after the Anniversary partaking in official merry-making and Ororo, with the perceptive subtlety that Lily expected had been honed as the occasional leader of the X-Men, had quietly suggested the least-traveled paths in the wilderness districts.

"We can stop for lunch at that clearing over there," Alex said and pointed down the mountain that they had been skirting the edge of. Lily followed his finger towards a small space in the middle of the trees that was next to a very tiny lake. "'Ro said that all of the lakes in this district are natural ones with melted polar ice, so it'll have nice cold water to drink."

Lily grunted, but Alex was too chipper to notice and, with a jaunty hop, he started off again.

The Anniversary celebrations had been rather awesome and, once the overwhelming immediacy of them had faded a bit, Lily was sure that she and Alex would treasure having been present for them. It had been a year since Akkaba and the Merge and the world's first mutant nation spared no expense in celebrating the demise of mankind's great foe as well as the dawn of a new age of acceptance. Magnus and Remy had privately admitted that the festivities were structured with a heavy public relations angle in mind - the freedom of everyone from the great foe of Apocalypse was given slightly higher building than the (still very much theoretical) new openness about mutants. 

As part of the large entourage that was traveling to and from events with Magnus and Amelia, Lily and Alex had been present for the school play (thankfully it was slightly less epic than the adult version that had been presented to Magnus - leather-bound - by the Spanish Poet Laureate; Magnus had muttered privately after reading a few scenes that it had all the makings of a mutant restaging of the _Iliad_ ) as well as the speeches and visiting dignitaries and the solemn procession at the Wall of Heroes. Lily and Alex had recognized many of the names on the list of those who had perished at Akkaba and Alex in particular had been greatly moved by the respect the deceased had been accorded. All of which was taken no less seriously for being surrounded by state-sanctioned partying. 

The Two Days of Akkaba were national holidays in the New Lands and had culminated in an awesome fireworks display. The launchers had been set up outside of the bubbles - mostly for environmental reasons - and there had been viewing stations built in each of the largest districts. Lily and Alex had gotten to watch from the Presidential viewing stand. Alex...

Realizing that Alex was already a good fifty yards ahead of her, Lily groaned and sped up so that she could catch up. 

Camping was an Alex thing to do and Lily went along with it because it made him happy. Personally, she liked things like indoor plumbing and not having to stink of bug repellant. Her idea of a vacation was to travel to a place she hadn't been before - see someone else's history and culture. All of her traveling as a child had been between her parents and not to any exotic foreign lands, so she tended not to have the 'been there, done that' attitude that affected many Navy brats. The New Lands were creating their own history and culture and that was intriguing in a different way and that appealed almost more to the engineer in her than the explorer.

Along that line of thought, despite her general underwhelming enthusiasm for camping out, Lily would readily admit to anyone who asked just how impressive the New Lands were as a whole and how spectacular the 'natural environments' were in particular. During one of her visits to Montreal, Lily had been to the Biodome, but this was the Biodome writ large. And lived in by more than penguins and capybaras. 

It had been far less expensive for the New Lands to build as many of the bubbles as they could at once rather than to do it on an ad hoc basis. The result was that out of the dozen biospheres initially constructed, five were heavily populated and had the beginnings of the New Lands' commercial and industrial concerns and the rest were either sparsely inhabited or, as was the case with two, uninhabited. The uninhabited bubbles were natural conserves ( _not_ preserves, as Magnus had taken great pains to point out), although once the population of the New Lands had grown sufficiently the decision would have to be made whether to build new bubbles or convert them to more urban environments. Lily thought that they'd just build new ones - the New Lands didn't even have its own university yet, but she and Alex well knew the eager buzz among the rest of the world's academics to start researching the new country's unique ecology. It would be a boon to the New Lands' economy that was more than worth the expense of building new biospheres. 

The central bubble, which was mostly taken up by the capital district of Aliyah and to which the airport was annexed, was temperate as were two of the four other main bubbles and had had its climatology settings modeled on the New York-Madrid latitude. When they had toured Aliyah's Climatology Control Facility, Alex had made a comment about the humidity being too low to be accurate for such a claim and had been snarled at by the CCF head who had groused about the expense of raising the humidity level even one percent. Lily had nearly died of laughter as Alex had borrowed a pen and paper from Magnus on the ride home and started doing the calculations himself. Amelia had suggested Alex come work for the Ministry of Environment and Alex hadn't immediately demurred. Lily wasn't sure what to make of that, but Alex hadn't said anything since. 

The climate of the other two heavily populated bubbles had been decided by popular referendum, an idea that at first seemed surreal to Lily ("Okay folks, what should our weather be?") but then seemed eminently practical - in a place where it was so expensive to build at all, why have a climate where nobody wanted to live? The results had been surprising, at least to Lily. The first wasn't really a shocker - tropical warmth (it was "the party bubble," Remy had joked) - but the other was set up to best recreate near-Arctic conditions ("Think Helsinki," Ji-Won, who worked there, had said.) Alex and Lily had been promised a site tour of Biosphere Five - where Ji-Won was chief site geologist at the New Lands' biggest mining operation - the day before they were due to leave.

They were currently tramping around in Biosphere Nine, a.k.a. Noah Two, one of the bubbles that still had more animals than people per square kilometer. The mountains, valleys, and forests had been artificially created but now sustained themselves naturally (and certainly felt natural as Lily had tripped and cut her forearm against a fallen branch earlier) and it was hoped that the mass importation of natural resources would be slowed within a generation. In honor of the New Lands' recognition by the UN, many nations had gifted the new country with samples of native flora and mating-aged fauna. (Personally, Lily didn't think the New Lands really needed to import squirrels.)

All in all, Lily thought the city planning maps looked like giant SimCity screen captures - Kyung had in fact made a joke to that effect. Lily liked Kyung, who worked for the Commerce Ministry and spent his days wooing businesses to open stores and factories in the New Lands, and she thought he was a good match for Ji-Won. Purple hair notwithstanding - the purple nails and very slightly lavender-tinted skin had at first been odd, but quickly stopped being even noticeable - he worked well with Ji-Won. Alex had known her for six years and he said that this was the first time he had seen her take an active interest in her own personal life and on the possibility of there being something beyond a career. Alex had stopped just short of implying that he had had the same task with Lily, which was why Lily hadn't hit him.

Of course, now she was having trouble just finding him...

By the time she caught up with Alex, Lily was more than ready to take a break. It was two in the afternoon and they had been walking since nine. Privately, Lily suspected that Alex had plans to exhaust her each day that they were out here - she never slept well in the 'great outdoors' and had been known to take out her displeasure on her husband. 

What had looked like a lake from above turned out to be merely a swell in a brook; the burbling water was audible even before they could see it for themselves. Tucked into their packs was a fishing net and Alex was able to nab a decent-sized trout without too much effort. Lily didn't like store-bought trout, but fresh wasn't nearly as overwhelmingly fishy-tasting and it went well with the most salty of their dried rations. 

Leaning back on his pack and sucking thoughtfully on the straw of his water bottle Alex looked relaxed, far more so than he had in the last week, Lily realized. The forced smile of appreciation for the attention he had been receiving was gone, replaced by one of genuine enjoyment. Gone also was the furrow between his brows. Leaving her own pack where it was, Lily grunted as she got up and dropped down next Alex, elbowing him gently in the ribs to make room on his pack for her. He did so obligingly and held out his arm so that she could rest her head in the crook of his shoulder. 

"I like it here," Alex said well after Lily had gotten settled. 

"Here as in the Ninth Biosphere or here as in the New Lands?"

"Both," Alex replied. "I'd like the latter a bit more if it wasn't so...small-townish. I don't like everyone knowing who I am. There's so much interesting stuff here - the geomorphology studies alone would keep me occupied for years. But the constant attention makes me feel uncomfortable, like I'm being watched all the time."

"I think you might be," Lily said with a chuckle as Alex made a rueful face. "There are a lot of former residents of Genosha here. Havok is very much a hero to them."

"That's all well and good and I'm glad I was able to help them," Alex allowed with a sigh, using his free hand to rub at his nose. "But Havok's not the one on vacation here."

"It's going to take time for everyone not previously involved with the X-Men and their network to understand that you're a superhero some of the time and a person all of the time instead of the other way around," Lily pointed out dryly. "It certainly took me a while to get that clear and I married you."

"For which I am very grateful," he said, leaning over and kissing her. "It's just... 'Be careful of what you wish for because you just might get it', you know? From the start, all of us wanted a chance to lead a normal life - even people like Scott and Rogue, who were sure that they'd never be able to have a normal life. And that idea was such a fantasy that none of us ever really thought about the steps that went along with it. Like we all thought that one day we'd be internationally wanted terrorists and the next day we'd be going to PTA meetings."

Lily snorted. "Well, you're only still wanted in about eight countries, so things are improving." Magnus and Charles had been working on getting pardons for the X-Men ever since Akkaba, hoping to have everything in place before the SHIELD press conference in February. While many countries were agreeing (with various degrees of reluctance), many were not and the newly public status of the superheroes had added a new complication to the old game of hide-and-seek.

"Mmm," Alex murmured and Lily wondered whether he was lost in thought. And then she realized that his right hand had found the bottom zipper of her sweatshirt and knew exactly where his mind had wandered off to. There was a joke in here somewhere about Alex's amorous pursuits and the proximity to nature, but Lily was less than inclined to consider it just now. 


	11. September-October 2006

Alex returned to the kitchen table, looked over the fresh text on his laptop screen, and let loose a rather undignified giggle. Instant messaging wasn't the same as being in the same room as everyone, but it was as close as they were going to get for the foreseeable future because the time differences made videoconferencing impractical. 

It had been Sanjay - now at Oxford - who had started the group on chat. He'd gotten the idea from his sister, who convinced him to use Skype rather than spend money on the long distance phone bills. Within a couple of weeks, Sanjay had somehow figured out how to get most of Ji-Won, Paul and/or Stephanie, Alex, and even the email-phobic Valeri to be online at the same time. They could bitch and tease each other with an audience now. It was great fun, Alex decided, even with Paul and Stephanie's insane need to send digital photographs of their darling baby boy Jeffrey (who was, in fact, x-factor positive) to everyone.

Sanjay, Ji-Won, Valeri, and Alex were the only ones around at the moment and the current topic of discussion, Valeri's hunt for a job, had started while Alex had had his head in the freezer looking for the chicken thighs for dinner. Valeri's specialization was paleontology as was Sanjay's, but he was hoping to catch on at a museum rather than teach. 

Unfortunately, the only responses he had gotten so far was from a children's museum in Cleveland and an assistant librarian's spot in Salt Lake City that would be advanced to a full position should he get his MLS. He had, however, been offered a position at the sciences division of U Oklahoma-Norman's press (he had done an internship one summer with one of their major authors) and was pondering. 

Ji-Won (who was online despite it being the middle of the night in the New Lands because she had had to switch to night shift to cover for a co-worker) thought Valeri should take the editing job. Despite it being in Oklahoma, Norman was a major university press and, well, nobody wanted to end up in Paul's spot. Paul and Stephanie were living in Pittsburgh - Stephanie had gotten a job with one of the major steel corporations (and, in fact, would be returning from maternity leave next week) and Paul had gone along, just assuming that he'd be able to get a job in an area that derived a good bit of its economy from mining. But Paul hadn't been able to land anything 'of substance' and had been reduced to taking a job teaching earth science in the public school system. He was hoping to get into academia, but so far the only job offer had come from a community college in Wheeling, West Virginia, which was close, but not close enough for the money that they were offering. 

Sanjay, theoretically the best person for Valeri to talk to, was being curiously quiet on the matter, although Alex thought he knew why. Sanjay and Alex had had many discussions over the past few years about scrabbling by on freelance projects from museums and neither of them thought that Valeri was meant for that sort of thing. It was make-your-own-hours kind of stuff most of the time and Valeri really needed something a bit more structured. Unlike Alex, Valeri would be quite happy in a nine-to-five world. The problem was that Valeri didn't like any of the nine-to-five jobs that could be gotten with a doctorate in paleontology. 

After Ji-Won had to get back to work, Alex and Sanjay both started in on Valeri becoming a librarian. Librarians were needed in museums as well - Alex's crowning achievement of the month at the Museum of Natural History had been to charm Florence, the head of the in-house library, to let him stay a half-hour after the library closed (the library, nearly unknown despite having its entrance in the middle of the world-famous dinosaur exhibit, was a wealth of unique resources) to finish taking notes on a text too brittle to photocopy. By the time Alex had to sign off from the conversation in order to start preparing dinner, Valeri had backed down from his initial stark refusal even if he remained unconvinced. 

Alex closed up his laptop and brought it out to the living room so that he could convert the kitchen table from a workspace to a dining space. With his stuff stowed - Alex had finished his notes on the riverbed analysis he had been assigned from Lamont before chatting with his friends - he now had to figure out what was going to become dinner. They really needed to go food shopping - more so than usual because the vegetable prices had been outrageous last week (they had both balked at paying $2.99 a pound for peppers) and the bin was essentially bare apart from a lettuce, five carrots, and half a cucumber. Maybe Lily had stopped off at the grocer on the way to the subway - food was a lot cheaper on 137th Street. 

The pantry produced a can of chickpeas and there were still a few potatoes left, so Alex was able to be busily chopping away at what could be a decent curry when he heard the door open and close. 

"Hey," he called out over the sizzling onions in the frying pan and heard a muffled reply. "How were the little demons today?"

He received no answer, but with all of the noise he was making in the kitchen between the caramelizing onions and the running water in the sink where he was scrubbing potatoes, he assumed that he had missed her heading into the bedroom to change. 

But when Lily hadn't emerged by the time he had put the chicken up to brown, Alex started to get a little suspicious. 

"Lil?" he called out, wiping his hands on the dishtowel. No reply. 

She wasn't in the living room and wasn't in the study and when Alex found her in the bedroom, she was sitting on the edge of the bed still dressed in the outfit she had worn to work. 

He had paused by the doorway, but walked to stand in front of her when she didn't move. "Lily?" 

She looked up at him with such a surprised look that he was sure that she hadn't seen him come into the room.  He crouched in front of her and took her hands, which were ice cold. "What's the matter, honey?"

"I'm pregnant," she whispered and Alex just stared. 

"You're sure?" he asked, regaining his balance even as his mind started to spin. He sat down on the bed next to her and she immediately leaned into him, putting her forehead against his chest. 

"I just got back from the doctor," she said in a quiet voice just this side of unsteady. "I'm sure. Six weeks... The baby will be due in early May."

Alex shook his head. "But... how? I mean..." Lily had been on the Pill for as long as he'd known her. They had talked about it when they had gotten married and decided that they'd know when the right time to stop would be. 

"All those shots I took to go to the New Lands," she replied, sitting up and wiping the beginnings of a tear from her right eye. "They interacted badly with the Pill... Doctor Janes said that he knew of cases where it had happened before, but the odds were so small that he didn't think to make a big production out of warning me. The medicine had to be in my system for a certain period of time before they'd pose any sort of conflict and then it would have to be just the right part of my ovulation cycle..."

"He just didn't think to count on unerring Summers' luck, did he?" Alex asked, pulling her back against him. She went unresistingly. He swallowed hard before he asked the next question. "What do you want to do?"

Lily gave a short, hollow laugh. "What can I do?" she asked in return. "We're going to be parents."

Alex kissed the top of her head, squeezing her tightly. This was supposed to be the happiest moment in their lives, some dim part of his brain was trying to point out. They were going to have a baby... But it wasn't that simple. Lily had no strong maternal leanings - no "need to breed," as she'd put it - and Alex, truth be told, hadn't pushed her about it. He wanted children, but not before they were ready for them. And he wasn't sure that they had hit that point... although now it was being thrust upon them. 

Scott's experiences with baby Christopher (for that was how Alex still thought of Nathan as an infant) had affected Alex far more than he ever wanted to let on and Logan's disappearance had only cemented his determination to wait. Superheroing wasn't a job that allowed for someone to be a parent and Alex himself knew too well that 'retiring' from the job was only a pretense and not a reality. There was always another supervillian, always another battle to be fought. And it was the nature of the business to be willing to sacrifice personal happiness for the good of the many. 

Alex rubbed Lily's back, grounding himself as much as her. She was on the verge of giving into the sobs that he could feel welling up inside. 

She knew as well as he did that being the child of a superhero, even a retired one, was not an easy life. Scott and Madelyne had been back in Alaska, thousands of miles away from Cyclops and the X-Men, when their world had come apart and Christopher had been kidnapped. Logan and Sulven had been at home, doing nothing of import, when they had been pulled away from their babies - a separation that had done damage that was not fully healed nearly two years later. Even Reed and Sue Richards had had so many problems protecting Franklin not only from those who would use him to get to their parents, but also those who would use Franklin's own powers for their miscreant purposes...

"Do you think the baby will be a mutant?" Lily asked, sitting up a little. Alex tried not to look guilty that he had been considering just those thoughts - and how best to keep some of them from her. Lily knew of Christopher Nathan's exciting childhood and had been witness to the twins' problems, but... Alex wasn't sure how she'd react to knowing that there were those who would harness the powers of an innocent child, a non-combatant.

"I would have to put the odds in its favor," Alex replied, brushing her hair out of her face with a gentle hand. "With mutant births up since the Merge and my genes to contend with..."

"I thought so, too," she admitted, her breath hitching in the middle. "And you know what? It doesn't scare me nearly as much as it used to... It doesn't scare me as much as having a baby in the first place..."

"Oh, Lily," Alex murmured, pulling her into a fierce embrace. "You're going to be a fantastic mother. You are. Our baby's going to be doing classical mechanics before he's out of his high chair and will be able to do a soil analysis of the dirt he eats... Or he could be a she. Or a they..." 

"Don't say 'they'," Lily pleaded, a smile playing at one edge of her mouth even as tears were streaming down her face.

"No 'they'," Alex agreed, happy to have broken her sadness up a little although he wondered whether he was convincing himself or Lily. "At least until a sonogram proves otherwise."

Lily made a noise into his chest that would have been a laugh had she not also been crying. 

"Don't blow your nose in my shirt," Alex told her and she did it again.

"It's a bit overwhelming," Alex said after she had pulled away to get a tissue from her nightstand. "For me, too. But it's a baby. Not cancer, not something terrible at all. It may be a little sooner than we planned, but...Maybe this is someone's way of telling us it's time, you know? We may not be ready right at this moment, but when the time comes, we will be."

Lily blew her nose and looked at him with such a hopeful expression that Alex felt his heart break. He wished she wasn't so scared. 

"We're in a great position, you know," he went on, reaching for her hands after she threw away the tissue. "We're employed, our mortgage is tiny, we've got plenty of family and friends to bury us with unhelpful advice and then volunteer to baby-sit...Apocalypse is dead, the Merge has made this world a promising place to raise a mutant baby... And Junior is going to have someone almost exactly his age to defend him from the twins and Clare."

Lily looked at him confusedly for a moment before realization dawned. Sam and Dana had known for a few weeks that they were going to be having their first baby in April. Of course, they had been working on having a baby...A sudden thought made him burst out laughing. 

"What?" Lily asked, eyes narrowed as she watched him. "What is so funny?"

"Of all of the X-people to be having a celebration baby," Alex began, leaning back so that he was lying on the bed. "I don't think we were at the top of anyone's list of suspects to be having a kid nine months after any anniversary of Akkaba. That would be something Scott or Nathan would do by accident...Oh, man. How is Clare going to be related to our baby?"

Lily looked at him like he'd lost it before closing her eyes in concentration. "Nathan's your nephew and Clare's your grand-niece. So Nathan and our baby will be first cousins... So Clare will either be a second cousin or a first cousin once removed. I never remember how it works out."

Alex held out his arms and Lily lowered herself into his embrace and the two of them lay there, staring at the ceiling, each lost in their own thoughts. 

"We can do this," Alex finally said, squeezing Lily's shoulders for emphasis. "We are going to be astounding parents. We will be the first normal parents in recent Summers history. No ill-timed disappearances. No cloning - no matter how good of an idea it sounds like at the time. We will agree on a name and stick to it - and may I suggest that we stay away from naming our baby after anyone from my side of the family? I'm convinced that that's part of the problem..."

"I happen to like Katherine as a name," Lily objected. "And Deborah. There aren't too many normal female names on my side..."

"Well, how about just staying away from boys names?" Alex offered. "There haven't been any girls to create mayhem in the family tree... well, except Rachel and I'm inclined to blame her on Jean... And speaking of, you are _not_ allowed to attempt a hellmouth sacrifice of our child, okay?"

"Deal," Lily agreed. She reached up and took his hand. "I love you, Alex."

"I love you too," he replied, rolling over on to his side to face her. She had stopped crying and while her eyes were bloodshot, she didn't look nearly as... grief-stricken... as she had before. "I love you for being brave even when you think you can't be. And..."

The screaming wail of the smoke detector broke the moment totally. "Shit... I love you enough to burn dinner for you... Why don't we go out tonight?" he asked as he got up off the bed and ran to the kitchen, turning off the burner and opening the kitchen window further before grabbing the dishtowel and fanning the smoke detector until it turned off. 

When he returned to the bedroom after dumping the charred remains of the chicken and potatoes into the garbage and soaking the pan, he found Lily wearing jeans and a t-shirt and toweling off her face, obviously having just washed it. 

"I figure I should get as much use out of them as I can before... oh, jeez... what happens if I get fat and ugly and I can never lose all of the weight I gain with the baby? What happens if I get all hideous...?"

"And have to wear muumuus and we have to buy you clothes from Omar the Tentmaker?" Alex asked with a snort as he walked over to where she was staring at her image in the mirror. He hugged her from behind as they both faced the glass. "I'll love you no matter what. And if you get really nervous, we can wheel you out of the maternity ward and into the Danger Room where you can run around in a spandex suit chasing Prime Sentinels until you look like She-Hulk."

"Don't mock me," Lily told him with a frown as she looked critically at her figure. "I'm serious."

"So am I," Alex replied, kissing her cheek and pulling her backwards and away from the mirror. "You and Dana can come up with some post-partum routine that you can do together. Destroying holographs of Sam and me for getting you two pregnant in the first place... You're six weeks into a nine month pregnancy, stop fretting about the end before you get to it."

"Alex, the end of the road is the baby itself," Lily retorted as she turned around to face him. "This is the only time I'm going to have to think about things like this."

Truth be told, Alex was delighted that she was thinking about it and would indulge her for as long as he could before she developed a complex. Because worrying about maternity clothes was a helluva lot healthier than worrying that she'd be a miserable parent or that their child would have some horrible mutation or something worse. In its own warped way, it was the beginning of acceptance - even as he still didn't know how long Lily had suspected that she might be pregnant. 

They decided to go to the Vietnamese place on 90th and Amsterdam rather than order in from there, even if it meant waiting for twenty minutes. It was unspoken that they both wanted to be together among other people tonight rather than let the overwhelmingness of the situation stifle them in their apartment.

The walk to the tiny restaurant was one that they had made dozens of times in the past three years, but it was different somehow tonight. Alex for one was noticing new things - like how the bookseller with his tables set up just past the seating for the sidewalk café made it hard enough for pedestrians to pass by but would make it near impossible for a carriage or a stroller. Or how he had no idea if the big CVS on 86th had better prices than Duane Reade or Rite-Aid - Lily tended to pick up things he needed since she went to the drugstore more often. So much to learn in the next few months... and then so much more to learn once the baby was born... 

Alex allowed himself to get a little excited. In a lifetime surfeit with adventures, this was going to be the most amazing of them all and he was not going to let his habit of taking the most pessimistic view of anything ruin it. The glass was going to be half-full here. For himself and most importantly for Lily.

Intellectually, he knew that there was no point in fretting about accidents or evil villains or even whether the baby would be a mutant (although here Alex was relatively calm - neither he nor Scott had been infant-onset mutants and he was going to do everything in his power to make sure no child of his had to manifest because of trauma). The challenge would be to let his intellect convince his emotions - the ones that had been hurt so deeply with each incident and each attack. But he had time and it would be silly to think that everything would come at once. 

* * *

"What is that?"

"In English they call it a 'cat'."

"I know it's a cat, Alex, but what is a cat doing in our living room?"

"Watching you watch him... All right, all right, no hitting. I got him from the shelter on 79th and West End. I figured he'd be good practice."

"Practice for what? The baby?"

"Yeah. A little responsibility before our big one."

"Who gave you this idea, dare I ask?"

"Piotr. It came with an old Russian parable about farms and cows and picking out wives, so I decided to save you all of that and just get the cat."

"I appreciate your consideration. Is he housebroken?"

"I assume you mean the cat and not Piotr... Yeah. The shelter said he was dropped off a week ago by the son of an old lady who had died and he didn't want the cat."

"Ugh... they don't spare the guilt trips, do they? Well, I guess that explains why he's so... plump. Does he have a name?"

"I'm suggesting we come up with a new one... Does this mean we get to keep him?"

"When you look at me like that, I'm powerless to resist...I just hope you bond to our child this quickly. How bad is the old name?"

"'Snuggles'. But he doesn't answer to it."

"I wouldn't either. What do you suggest?"

"Well, he does sort of look like Felix the Cat... Felix the Cat, the wonderful, wonderful cat..."

"Stop singing or he stays Snuggles."

"So you like Felix?"

"I never had a pet growing up. I will defer to your superior pet nominalism."

"You had those fish when I first met you."

"And I named them after the Marx Brothers. So unless you'd like to name the cat Zeppo, I'm okay with Felix."

* * *

Alex looked up from his coffee and bagel as Lily staggered into the kitchen. "Do I ask you how you're feeling or do we go right to you beating me up?"

Lily just glared at him as she headed to the freezer to get out the loaf of supermarket oat bread. Morning sickness had started with a vengeance the previous month and hadn't let up yet. The Ob.-Gyn. had told them not to worry, but that didn't Lily's mornings any less miserable. She had initially kept crackers on her bedside table, but the crumbs in the bed soon made her more irritable than having to run to the bathroom. 

She put two slices in the toaster and looked around for the thermos.

"It's over here," Alex told her. Making mint tea was the least Alex thought he could do - especially since Lily, never a morning person, would get violent should he attempt to hover while she decided whether or not to throw up. "And there's a cup."

Alex tried to keep from smiling as Lily sat down next to him and poured herself tea without saying a word. This, too, was part of the routine. Sometime between her tea and toast and after her first trip back to the bathroom to pee, Lily would become a person again. And Alex had learned to hold back any comments until then. 

In the six weeks since they'd found out about the baby, things had been the same at the same time everything had changed. They had waited a week to tell a few people - family, basically. The general reaction had been one of pleasant surprise - and none more surprising than Christopher Summers announcing that he'd be planning a visit come June. He wanted to meet his daughter-in-law and grandchild; he had spoken to Lily, but had never met her in person. Otherwise, people were generally abiding by Lily and Alex's request to not make a big fuss about the impending baby - Lily had more than once expressed relief that Dana, a month farther along, was the focus of almost all of the attention. Although, frankly, most of the chatter these days was about the upcoming roster changes in the X-Men.

With the proposed founding of the XSE winning slow-but-steady world approval, Excalibur had sped up the process in Great Britain by announcing that they would be disbanding effective the New Year. Meggan and Brian wanted to get on with their married lives, Kitty and Pete had little Harry to watch, and Kurt was looking to settle down with Amanda - while taking up the team leadership spot that Ororo had vacated and Logan had very grudgingly agreed to take temporarily. 

And, of course, there was Piotr, who had finally announced his retirement - he had already picked out a converted loft apartment in the Village and was already making frequent visits to Westchester in anticipation of moving permanently next month. Alex was glad - not only that Piotr was finally taking the time to see to his own wants, but also that perhaps some of the... loneliness that had crept up on Piotr would be dissipated now that he was closer to more of his friends. 

A mewling noise from under the table distracted Alex from his thoughts. "Don't even think about it, Felix," he told the cat before the feline could pounce on the bit of bagel he'd dropped. Felix - who now answered to his name as much as any cat ever bothered to - had pretty much been a success so far. He had not slimmed down any - Alex thought he looked like a furry bowling ball - but after the first few episodes of cleaning up cat puke and Lily throwing a book at him after she found him on her desk, they had reached a détente. And Lily, who was not a big animal lover in general, genuinely seemed to like him even as she tended to refer to him as 'lardbutt.' 

Right on schedule, Lily was halfway done with her toast when she got up and disappeared, returning a few minutes later. "You can talk now," she told him with a rueful smile.

"Oh, good," Alex replied, sighing dramatically as she sat down. "So have you decided what to do about Perotelli's offer?"

The email had come over the weekend. Joe Perotelli, one of Lily's favorite professors from her undergrad days at MIT and someone she'd done credited research for while in grad school, had been elevated to the search committee for new faculty members for the Mechanical Engineering Department and had suggested that Lily submit her CV for the currently open (tenure track) position. Perotelli didn't think that Lily would get the job - it was still two years before she could even force an early tenure review at City College and there were several bigger names interested in the spot at prestigious MIT. But he did think that getting an audition now would stand her in excellent stead in a few years when the next position opened up as well as being an excellent carrot to wave before her own department.

"Well, I'm going to talk to him a little more about it before I make a decision," Lily said thoughtfully as she chewed on her toast. She took a sip of tea before continuing. "I don't want to go up there and it be completely obvious that they're interviewing me as a favor to him. And there's the whole 'how pregnant am I going to be' question - it's going to look bad if I'm either as big as a house or if I'm puking up my guts before the audition."

Alex nodded. He knew Lily would love to change schools even as she was not so keen on leaving New York. City College had a few bright kids, mostly immigrants who couldn't afford private universities. But the rest of the students were beneficiaries of the City University's open enrollment policy - anyone with a New York City high school diploma was guaranteed admission to one of the two-dozen campuses. And even within the Engineering programs, the level of students tended not to be very high. Lily constantly complained that she had to teach her kids how to add before she could teach them how to do physics. And a job offer at MIT could get her a lot of leverage at some of the more prestigious places in or nearer to New York. Although personally Alex didn't mind Boston so much.

"Well, the selection process tends to take forever anyway," Alex pointed out as Lily refilled her teacup. "The baby may be born by the time they get around to it."

"Perotelli said they had to get their guy by Christmas," Lily said, shaking her head even as she leaned back and checked the kitchen clock. "They upped the incoming class by a quarter and the freshman sections are close to overcrowding. The trustees started to get worried phone calls - all of the departments are sort of in spasm to increase the number of sections for the spring without either draining the budgets or making the big name professors teach undergrads. Of course, their budgets are like ten times what my department's is..."

"Don't get covetous," Alex teased.

"Hey, it's better to be green with envy than green around the gills from morning sickness," Lily replied with a frown, obviously catching a look at the clock. "Damnit. I hate Tuesdays."

Still drinking the last of her tea, she got up, waited for Felix to get out from under her feet, and headed off for the bathroom again. 

Forty-five minutes later, Alex had moved to the living room and opened his laptop and was typing away when a fully dressed Lily walked by. 

"Do we need anything from the market?" she asked as she sat down to put on her sandals. Tuesdays were her long day at school - an 11AM section of undergrad fluid dynamics, mid-afternoon office hours, and then the weekly 4:15 graduate turbulent flow section. 

"Umm... Felixfood," Alex replied, thinking about what else he had forgotten to get the previous afternoon. He had had to get cat litter and that meant that some items had to be left off the list so that he could carry everything.  "And the usual fruits and veggies... although we have enough lettuce to start a rabbit farm, so don't get any more."

Lily made a face as Felix ambled past on his way to 'his' spot on the love seat - one of the cushions had been covered with a garish rug that her mother had given them. "I think we should give him the lettuce. Look at him! He's putting on more weight than I am."

"Well, if one of us is going to be putting on sympathy weight, I'd really rather it be him," Alex told her with a grin. "And you should be putting on more weight."

Lily narrowed her eyes and frowned at him as she stood up. "The doctor said that I was fine and not everyone needs to put on twenty pounds in the first few months," she said shortly. It was a sore topic for her and while Alex knew it wasn't in his best interests to encourage his wife to gain weight, he just wanted to be careful. "I'm not starving myself and the baby is getting everything it needs. It's not my fault that our child does not seem to like chocolate."

Alex, not wanting to start a fight, just smiled. Lily had gotten violently ill last week after eating some of Orly's birthday cake. While Lily hadn't been as put out as she had been upon finding out that she could no longer tolerate Korean pickles, the loss of chocolate had been a mild disappointment. "That'll change."

"Hey, it'll keep me away from the Halloween candy you got," Lily offered. Alex smiled - Lily, for reasons that baffled him, liked candy corn - especially the kind with the brown bottoms (nominally chocolate) instead of the orange ones. Alex hadn't gotten any candy corn, but had gotten a bag of Almond Joy's to hand out to the kids living in the building who would ring the doorbell.

The little envelope icon in the system tray of his laptop window flashed and Alex clicked on his mail program and read as Lily disappeared into the office. 

"Piotr's going to be coming in tomorrow," Alex told her as she re-emerged. He skimmed the email. "He wants to know if we can come by the loft this weekend... I think he wants you to double-check that the electrician didn't fleece him when he re-wired the studio and he definitely wants me to help him break down that cast-iron trellis-thingie that's separating the dining area from the living room."

Piotr was spending his 'severance pay' from the X-Men on his new apartment, fixing it up so that it could be both home and studio. Alex, as the person living closest to the place, had already been by a few times to check on the contractors. It was going to look spectacular, he thought. And while nobody had said anything as far as Alex knew, Piotr was anticipating _something_ by only taking apart one of the bedrooms (the place had been the home of a couple with three grown children and had a master suite plus three smaller bedrooms). 

"It's fine with me," Lily replied as she picked up her bag and her keys. "And the trellis-thingie isn't so bad. It's just too much. Maybe you could trim it back a little. Make it an accessory instead of a feature."

"Well, I trust Piotr's judgment," Alex said, standing up so that he could kiss his wife goodbye. "I'm heading over to the Museum later today to dump off the proofs. I'm assuming I'll be back before you are, but just in case I'm not, you'll know where I am."

"Yeah, yeah," Lily muttered as she leaned in. "I'll see you later."

Before heading over to the museum, Alex spent a little time cruising the real estate websites and the _NY Times_ real estate listings. Helping Piotr out was fine, but he and Lily needed to think about what to do with their own situation - as it stood, they were faced with either converting their study into a bedroom for the baby or trying to find a two-bedroom apartment that they could afford. Well, not afford because there was nothing that they could afford, but a place that would make sense to take out a second mortgage for. This was the other side to Lily interviewing up in Boston - Manhattan as a couple was expensive enough. Manhattan once you started having children got downright outrageous. With him basically working at home and Lily doing a lot of work there as well, they really did need a dedicated space for that sort of thing - apart from the fact that Alex had no idea where they'd put all of their books and their desks and the computer if they tried to convert the study into the baby's room. 

Scott had suggested moving up to Westchester - not to the estate or even necessarily to Salem Center, but to one of the neighboring towns along the MetroNorth line. Their commute wouldn't be too bad - Lily could take the train to 125th and being in Westchester would make it easy for Alex to get up to the Lamont-Doherty labs more often than he did, but Alex _liked_ living in Manhattan, even with all of the added expenses. And Westchester meant that they'd have to get a car - probably two cars - and the taxes were higher and it really wouldn't be that much less expensive in the long run. And, contrary to Rogue's opinion, Alex had no doubts that you could raise a child in Manhattan without it having a backyard to play in. Millions of people in this city had been born and raised here and none of them seemed irreparably damaged by having to go to the park in order to have flowers to trample.

Alex snorted in amusement as he caught a glimpse of himself in one of the mirrors in front of the Duane Reade - the transformation was complete. He had gone from leader of X-Factor to a guy with a wife and a cat and a kid on the way and who was worried about taxes and second mortgages and should he finally knuckle under and take the full-time position that was about to be offered to him... It wasn't the version of Xavier's Dream that he had always envisioned, but perhaps that was a good thing after all. 


	12. December 2006

Fur. Alex reached out across the bed for his wife and instead got fur. 

"Sorry, Felix," Alex mumbled into his pillow as the cat expressed his indignation at the surprise grope. 

"Get up, 'Lex," Lily said as she entered the room. "Sulven's going to be here in half an hour."

Alex moaned, rolling over. He didn't want to get out of bed, let alone get teleported halfway around the world to cause rockslides. For some reason, he hadn't been able to sleep the previous night - rather, he hadn't been able to avoid falling into the same nightmare that had been plaguing him for the last several days. It was a sort of choose-your-own-adventure kind of nightmare and every decision he made seemed to get him into deeper trouble. It was just close enough to any sort of reality to be disturbing, but not concrete enough for him to bother Lily with. It probably just had to do with going back to Akkaba anyway.

"Alex," Lily repeated, elongating the vowels the way she did when she wanted something. Which in this case meant him getting out of bed, so he was less inclined to obey than he would be were she asking for something else. Like, say, anything that involved her getting into bed. 

"I'm going to drink your coffee," Lily threatened when he didn't stir. 

"Don't you dare," Alex muttered, throwing back the blanket - sending Felix scurrying - without making any other move to get out of bed. "It's bad for you. And it's bad for me. I'm not going to be able to deal with everyone uncaffeinated."

"Well, if you don't get out of bed," Lily warned, coming over to the bed and reaching out her hand for Alex to sit up, "you're going to have to choose between uncaffeinated or unshowered. Sulven _will_ teleport you in your pajamas."

"I know, I know," Alex sighed, finally getting out of bed, the threat of Sulven doing just that - gleefully - was enough to rouse him. He stretched, frowning as his left shoulder popped. "Stay away from my coffee," he told Lily as he walked by her, kissing her on the cheek and then heading towards the bathroom.

Fifteen minutes later, Alex was showered and halfway into his uniform - he was pretty sure he could eat breakfast without needing the body armor. Sulven had been housebroken as far as doing damage indoors.

Lily was sipping her tea - and eyeing the coffeepot covetously - when he came into the kitchen. There was a pair of fat envelopes on the small table underneath the kitchen phone that he didn't remember being there yesterday. Picking them up, he realized that they were the copies of the mortgage and sales agreements.

What initially had been a source of great concern - where to find a place to live with the baby - had been resolved with almost eerie coincidence when it was announced at the November Co-op board meeting that one of the fourth-floor two-bedroom apartments would be going up for sale starting in January. Alex and Lily had pounced, despite knowing that purchasing the larger apartment was going to require them to re-do their mortgage and was going to cost them more than they'd really wanted to spend - by five figures - but the convenience of only moving downstairs and of staying so close to both of their jobs was just too much to give up. 

"Scott said that we should try to work out some sort of fair trade agreement with the Wisdoms - we help them move in and Kitty helps us move downstairs," Lily said as she looked up from her breakfast. Now that the morning sickness was past, Lily was making a conscious effort to eat in the mornings, something she had never done in the past. Although as far as Alex was concerned, Lily still wasn't eating enough.

"How would that work?" Alex asked as he peeled an orange. "They're moving to the mansion, which means that there are going to be a million people helping them move in. You're in no shape to be helping anyone move..."

"I'm a little pregnant, Alex," Lily retorted irritatedly as she got up. "Not an invalid."

"A little pregnant," Alex repeated mock-thoughtfully. "I don't think that's in the same category as horseshoes and hand grenades."

Lily bopped him on the head with the banana she had just taken off the bunch. 

"But back to the moving thing," Alex said after he had eaten a third of his orange and conveniently forgotten it in favor of a bagel. Lily wouldn't have thought to eat the orange had it just sat there in the fruit bowl, but she'd finish off whatever he left rather than wrapping up bits of fruit. He wasn't sure if she'd figured out that he was creating leftovers intentionally. "Kitty phasing things through the hallway floor would be kind of fun. And it would be great to not have to disassemble the TV cabinet to fit it through the door... Maybe I'll go up there and help out and then cash in the brownie points for March. You'll be far enough along by then that we can rely on the guilt factor to make up the difference."

"You are so..." Lily trailed off with a frown.

"Calculating," Alex supplied with a grin. "Runs in the family. Speaking of calculating - are you all set for the interview? Do you need anything before you go? Do you have the phone number of where you're going to be staying yet?"

After much back-and-forth with Joe Perotelli, Lily had decided to go through the interview process at MIT. A pair of recent journal articles of hers (one co-written with Alex, one a logical next step from her dissertation) had caused a bit of a stir and Perotelli had pronounced her 'hot' - in the academic sense. She'd be two days in Boston, which still put her back in New York before Alex would be - and that was with teleportation each way.

"Yes, Daddy," Lily sighed, picking up the orange and taking off a section before returning it to next to Alex's coffee cup. "I'm all packed, I've got two hours between my office hours and the train so I could walk down to Penn Station and still make it - no, I'm not going to walk, stop looking at me like that - and the hotel phone number is on a Post-it attached to the book you packed... And I better go and get dressed. Sulven'll be here in a minute anyway."

Lily took another few sections of orange, putting the three remaining sections back on the table and then her teacup in the sink. Alex heard her greet Sulven and got up himself. She - Sulven - had obviously teleported into the foyer. 

"Are you ready to depart?" Sulven asked without preamble as he stepped out of the kitchen. She was dressed in a modified version of the current X-uniform, one that made her look slightly more a part of this century than her own, and she was wearing a decidedly twenty-first century look of impatience. 

"Good morning, Sulven," Alex said, smiling as the small woman frowned. Logan would meaningfully tease her for being too willing to do away with basic formalities and Alex was thankful that she didn't think that he was trying to correct her. "Let me go grab my stuff. How are Logan and the twins?"

Sulven snorted. "One has decided to take up piano, one has decided to take beer with dinner despite my displeasure, and one has decided to repaint the bathroom walls without consulting anyone."

Alex tilted his head thoughtfully as he worked out what she had said. The twins had turned four the previous month. "I'm not sure whether or not to even ask which one is which," he told her honestly, catching the vaguely humorous glint in her eye. It was a flash, barely noticeable even if you were looking for it. 

"They look well," Sulven said, gesturing with her hand towards the bedroom. 

Alex nodded and smiled. The first time he had heard Sulven refer to Lily as 'they', he had been confused - and Lily, too self-conscious by far, had been traumatized thinking that the tiny, svelte Sulven thought that she was fat enough to be referred to in the plural (truth be told, Lily had put on all of five pounds and was not really showing). In reality, it was simple telepathy - Sulven, like most telepaths, saw with her mind and not her eyes. So Sulven, not a native English speaker, saw Lily and the baby (who was now far enough along to be recognizable on the astral plane) and used the plural because it was technically correct. Jean had reminded him that Sulven had started using the royal plural relatively early on in her own pregnancy for the same reason.  

"Stop dithering, Summers," Sulven said, snapping her fingers to shake Alex from his thoughts. "We have mountains to melt. Retrieve your gear."

Alex saluted and fairly jogged into the bedroom. Lily was in her slip and stockings - a colleague of hers had told her of the joys of stockings instead of pantyhose for the pregnant set, but Alex just thought she looked great in them - and was standing in front of her closet digging out her dress. Alex scooped up the small pile of body armor from the chair and took it to the bed, sitting down so he could better strap everything on. 

"The dichotomy here is really too much," Lily said with a laugh as she closed the closet door, looking from the dress she was holding from its hanger to where Alex was slipping on his shin pads. 

"We all dress for success in our own ways," Alex replied primly, standing up to get his boots. "Although I don't see why I need all this stuff if all I'm going to be doing is sealing off caverns."

The post-Apocalypse cleanup went on more than a year after the fact. Detecting and destroying shrines, hideouts, caches, and anything else that could conceivably be used by some malevolent former drudge of En Sabah Nur was an ongoing effort, one that Alex was only rarely involved in much to his relief. He was only called in when he was the only person for a task, not just the closest person. Scott had specifically asked him to help in Akkaba, though. The mountain caves were too pervasive and too deep to simply be blown up or shaken down. 

"Better safe than sorry," Lily replied, her voice muffled as she slid the dress over her head. "Help me with the back?"

Alex crossed the room to her, letting his hands slide up her sides, around to her growing belly, and up again before fastening the one button at the back of her neck. He kissed the spot of skin right above it and Lily shivered, leaning back so that they were in contact almost from head to toe. 

"Be careful, all right?" she asked, her forehead nestled in the curve of his neck. "You and mountains and riverbeds...You might bliss out and trip or something."

Alex smiled. Lily never outright said that she was nervous every time he went off to be Havok. She'd be no better when he was Commander Summers or whatever silly title Scott was going to hang on him when the XSE became official in six months' time. 

"I'll be good," he promised, turning her around so that he could kiss her without the awkward angle. "I promise."

"You're also going to be late," Sulven barked from the doorway. "Let's go."

Lily blushed and then laughed outright - Sulven was Sulven, and one could only get used to her because she wasn't likely to change. 

"You knock 'em dead up there," Alex urged his wife as he went back to the chair by the window to pick up his backpack. "And don't get into any trouble. I won't be around to bail you out if the Boston Police suddenly realize one of the culprits of some of the unsolved Harvard Yard pranks is on the loose."

"They don't hang pregnant women," Lily assured him with a grin. After a few scotches late one night while they were first dating, Lily had confessed to helping out with some of the hijinx that were part of the Harvard-MIT rivalry. No felonies, but a few criminal mischief charges could have been laid and Lily and the other tricksters had kept quiet for very good reasons. 

"All right," Alex said, looking around the room and ignoring the fact that Sulven was tapping her foot. He was pretty sure he had everything... "Scott wanted that book. It's in the living room," he told Sulven, who stood back and gestured for him to pass her. 

"I love you and I'll miss you and I'll see you in three days," Alex told Lily as he passed her by, pausing for one last kiss, Sulven-be-damned. "And you, too," he added, bending down to address Lily's abdomen. "Behave yourself and no funny business." He kissed her belly too, barely avoiding Lily's hand as she swatted him away. 

"Love you," she said wistfully, reaching out and letting her hand slide down his face as he stood up. 

The book - a dramatically told description of the discovery of a prince's burial tomb in Peru - was out on the coffee table, Alex having remembered to take it out of the bookshelf the previous evening. 

"You are aware that he can't hear you?" Sulven asked conversationally as she watched him rubber-band the book closed. "He's going to be headblind. A boon, I rather think. Telepathy is one of the worst powers to manifest before one is old enough to understand it."

Alex nodded. There was a reason that the twins and Clare didn't leave the mansion much and that the twins were not enrolled in preschool - they didn't know how to shield yet. Everyone at the mansion shielded themselves from the trio and when they did go out, one of the adult telepaths would have to protect Nick, Zara, and Clare from the influx of thoughts and emotions of others. And then a completely different thought hit him... "Are you using 'he' in the general sense?"

"I was referring to your son," Sulven elaborated, looking at him with an expression that clearly meant that she couldn't imagine there being any confusion over the matter. 

Alex took a step back. "It's a boy?" He and Lily hadn't known - hell, he didn't think the doctor knew yet. "You can tell?"

Sulven's look of puzzlement faded into one of mild embarrassment. "The astral presence is definitely male... Was I not supposed to share that bit of information?"

"Ah," Alex cut himself off, waving his hand vaguely. "Honestly, I hadn't thought about whether I wanted to know or not. I think Lily wants it to be a surprise, though."

Sulven nodded once. "I shan't say anything to her then. Now, put your book away so that we can leave."

He no sooner put it in his backpack than Sulven grabbed him by the elbow, muttering in Askani, and the world faded to white. 

* * *

"So?"

"Sew buttons," Professor Joe Perotelli replied with a cheeky grin as Lily leaned back in her chair. The two were alone in his office, theoretically relaxing after the inquisition of the full interview panel and before the unofficial inquisition - dinner. The audition - a section of freshman mechanics - had been that morning.  "You had them looking like they might have learned something in class today. And most of the students were pretty interested, too."

Lily smiled. The audition had, strangely enough, been the easiest part. Being in a room full of kids who actually _knew_ the answers, had not only done their homework but had done extra work to make sure that they knew more than the next kid... it had been refreshing, to say the least. Halfway through the discussion about mixing in two-layer flows, Lily had completely forgotten about the panel of professors and administrators sitting in the back with dour expressions. 

"You're good in the classroom," Perotelli admitted. A short, balding man with thick glasses and a thickening middle, he seemed to be almost proud of his image as one of the most stereotypical engineers one could hope to meet. "You've come a long way since that first time I saw you down at City."

"I was just psyched to have a room full of kids who understood me," Lily replied. Two years previous, at her invitation, Perotelli had visited her classroom. It had been a bad day, Lily remembered, and were there no visitors, she would have just given them a pop quiz and sent them home.

"It went very well, I think," Perotelli said. "And if Ilya can get past the fact that he's old and slowing down and not going to come up with every new innovation in multiphase flow and vortex theory from now until he shuffles off this mortal coil, then you've got a great chance in a few years."

Lily smiled and sighed to herself. For all of the talking she had done to herself before she had even agreed to come up to Cambridge about how she wasn't really in line for the job, it still hurt a little to have it so casually confirmed. "So, who's looking to be the favorite, if I may ask?"

"Would you believe Donald Yenette?" Perotelli asked, leaning forward to tie his shoe and disappearing behind his desk as he spoke. 

"Donald 'I don't do classrooms' Yenette?" Lily snorted. The man had been a legend long before Lily had even decided to become an engineer. He probably hadn't taught undergrads in twenty years and Lily couldn't even begin to imagine why he'd want to start now. "Who caught him doing what that he's getting back into teaching?"

Perotelli laughed as he reappeared. "That's what I wanted to know. But I didn't dare ask him. Arnaud came close, though. Framed it in terms of... oh, what _was_ the phrase... 'a re-whetting of the pedagogical appetite.' When you're an engineer and start dropping phrases like that, then it's time to get into administration. Traitor to the species."

Arnaud Maldouf was a former mechanical engineering professor who had moved over to the Dean's Office while Lily was an undergrad. She had had him for intro to optics, though, and was pleased to see him on the interview panel even if there was no way he'd remember her from the sea of faces that appeared before him every semester. She knew he and Perotelli had been good friends for decades and that couldn't hurt. Nor could it hurt to have a fan in the administration.

"What did Yenette say?"

"Oh, something of no consequence," Perotelli scoffed, looking at his watch and tapping it. It was time to go. They were meeting the others back in Boston at a restaurant that had opened up after Lily had moved on to Princeton but that she had been told was superb - and expensive. "We found out later that there's a rumor that SHIELD is going to shut down the Elsevier Labs as part of the whole mutant police force thing the UN came up with. Something to do with heavy investment by Trask Industries."

Lily reacted honestly and with surprise. Yenette hadn't been a hero, per se, but she certainly respected his work and his deserved reputation as one of the brightest lights in the history of contemporary fluid dynamics. "The guy was being backed by mutant hunters?"

Perotelli shrugged and stood up. "I don't know if it's true or not, or even if it there was any sort of malevolent activity going on or if Yenette was involved. He could just have smelled smoke and jumped ship before it sank. The man has been around long enough to smell a scandal brewing."

"I guess," Lily admitted, also standing up. She wasn't at the point where she needed to use her arms to hoist herself out of a chair, but there was definitely something _different_ in the motion. 

They stopped off at the well-appointed office of Dean Maldouf and the trio headed back across the Charles River in Perotelli's Audi.

The menu looked intriguing for a steakhouse - engineers were meat eaters as a general rule - and Lily was disappointed that she had to limit her choices of food to what she knew with absolute certainty that she could handle - the panel members knew that she was pregnant, but that was no excuse for not being able to keep food down. And the last month had been full of surprises - she had grown up eating her grandmother's Korean food, been forced to follow her mother's various food crazes, and then married a man who would eat anything so long as it didn't eat him first (and, Lily was sure, that had probably happened to Alex at some point). She was not _used_ to being particular about her food. 

Settling on a simple soup (and remembering Orly's firm advice about never, ever ordering a salad when on an interview dinner) before a straightforward tenderloin, Lily was left to nibble on bread as the others sampled more exotic fare. 

"So tell me, Lily," Ilya Simonov began as he washed down a shrimp with a sip of wine. "I meant to ask you this earlier and I was disappointed that none of my esteemed colleagues asked you themselves, distracted as they were by your other recent work. I know what we teach our undergraduates and I know Ray Dagley well enough. From whence does this interest in control theory come from? That letter you and your... husband?... dashed off in response to Yiannakis and company's article on plasma transfer stability... It was a brilliant piece of work. Not in your field, though, is it? And your husband is a geologist, right?"

Lily smiled and took a sip of water. "Well, control theory has been a side interest of mine for a few years," she replied blandly. "And heat transfer theory is topic that Alex has been interested in for decades, albeit in slightly less... technical terms. Our first joint academic project."

The article - purporting a whole new theory of dynamic control of plasma displacements - had come out in the _Journal of Fluid Dynamics_ back in January. Lily had skimmed it, found it ridiculous, and gone off to find her husband. After she had translated the terms, Alex, too, had thought it ridiculous - according to Panayotis Yiannakis, Alex shouldn't have been able to do half of the things he did on a regular basis. Or else he should have spontaneously combusted sometime around the age of twenty-five. Lily had sat down and started writing a rebuttal, Alex contributing his experience as well as doing spot demonstrations. Courtesy of the journal's editor being a bit of an iconoclast, or perhaps sensing a topic that could cause excitement in a journal that wasn't known for producing any, the reviewed rebuttal had appeared in the April issue. Yiannakis - a worthy name in the field - had not taken it well and rumor had it that the December issue (delayed two weeks and due out the following Tuesday) would contain the man's righteous indignation in the form of the lead article. Even as Lily was amused at the editor's blatant attempt to turn this disagreement into a serial - it wasn't that hard to run both one's comments and another's rebuttals in the same issue instead of in consecutive ones - she wasn't worried. If push came to shove, Alex could just show off a little. Yiannakis was arrogant and the very idea that someone not trained in the field could have any sort of understanding, let alone a superior understanding than his own, would be hard for him to take.

"I'm sorry your husband wasn't able to join you up here this week," Maldouf said, seeming to genuinely mean it. Lily assumed everyone at the table knew of Alex's 'other life' although it had never come up. Perotelli knew and if she were a serious candidate, then it was bound to have come up in committee discussions. "Did you leave him home in New York?"

"He's in Egypt," replied, covering her water glass with her hand so that the waiter wouldn't refill it - she needed to keep track of how much she drank.  "I'm sure he would have loved to come up here. He's quite fond of the Boston area."

The conversation turned to less weighty fare - the annual mid-season swoon of the Bruins, the announced complications that would cause closures to correct what was still known as the Big Dig, the latest attempt by the CalTech students to engage the MIT undergrads in some sort of athletic competition - as entrees were brought and it wasn't until eating had slowed that the topic returned to professional matters. 

"You mentioned something earlier about Klebanoff nodes," Perotelli began and Lily smiled. He had that twinkle in his eye that meant that she had nothing to fear. "Please tell me you've come up with an interesting use for them."

"Well," Lily sighed dramatically and smiled. This was her 'other' baby, the results of the log from Akkaba. Without getting into specific details about the source of her data (she wasn't ready to confess to being at Akkaba), she gave a vague outline of her ideas and the real-world examples she had to back it up. When she had finished, several sets of eyebrows rose at once. 

"Oh, would that I were still refereeing journals," Maldouf sighed. "All of the interesting things happen after I go away."

"Your own damned fault, Arnie," Perotelli retorted. "So, does this wait until you've beaten back the mad Greeks or can we expect this assault on reality as we've understood it to begin sooner rather than later?"

"Ah, I think it depends on what the December issue of the _JFD_ looks like," Lily replied, allowing herself a bit of a wicked smile. Academic disputes could be a lot of fun when you were sure you were right.

Simonov was about to say something else when the Maitre d' came up to them. 

"Excuse me for interrupting your meal," he began, looking both mournful and apologetic. "I am looking for a Doctor Summers?"

Lily had taken great care not to eat as much of the meal as she would have liked, but all of her vigilance was for naught as her stomach - baby and all - flipped over. "That would be me," she said quietly. 

"There is a gentleman here to see you," he said. He spoke delicately, Lily thought, as if he knew he was the bearer of bad news. "He said it was of utmost importance."

The man had gestured just enough so that Lily looked behind him to see who it could be. And she felt very, very cold as she could make out the distinctive features of one Nathan Dayspring Summers. 

* * *

"Hi. You've reached our machine. Leave a message and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks."

"Lily? It's Ji-Won... We just heard. I'm so sorry... We're all praying for you. If there's anything I can do, just call me. It doesn't matter what time..."

"This is a message for Lily Summers. We are confirming that your Tuesday appointment at 11:30 with Doctor Friedenthal has been cancelled. Missing an appointment at this stage of your pregnancy should be avoided at all costs, so please call us to reschedule as soon as possible. Thank you."

"Lily? It's your mother. I know we haven't spoken for a long time and... Oh, sweetheart. I'm so sorry. They had it on the news about Alex...Please let me know if I can do anything and let your father know...I love you."

"Mrs. Summers, this is Juana Wilson from the Museum of Natural History. I worked with Alex... I'm so sorry for your loss..."

"Lily, it's Lorna... I... I don't know what to say and just telling you to 'hang in there' sounds really trite. And reminding you that this has happened before doesn't do jack shit for the pain. Just... we're all here for you, okay?" 


	13. December 2006-January 2007

"Good evening and welcome to the News Hour. I'm Elouise Parkash. Tonight, the world takes another step towards officially recognizing the rights and powers of mutants as four more countries have followed the G-10's lead in signing on to the documents that will come to be known as the Cairo Accords. Greece, South Africa, Switzerland and Finland today became the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth countries to agree to the protocols that will formally recognize the rights of mutants as well as the global authority of the proposed mutant security force. More on that later on in the hour.

"In related news, the US government's own official mutant agency, X-Factor, suffered a tragic loss yesterday as former leader Alexander Summers, known to the world by his codename Havok, is missing and presumed dead after an explosion rocked the site of last year's Battle at Akkaba during a routine mission. 

"X-Factor's press release, issued earlier today, said only that Summers was part of a team assuring the continued success of the August 2005 Battle at Akkaba. Witnesses, however, reported an explosion at around 7PM local time that could be seen from up to a mile away. There were fifteen people taken to area hospitals for treatment, although their conditions are not known at this time and X-Factor, perhaps hoping for the best, classified their former team leader as 'missing in action.' There were no other casualties.

"Summers, who had retired from the team in 2000, had only recently rejoined X-Factor as part of the global clean-up efforts. Honored by the United Nations for his role in the Battle at Akkaba, Summers returned to his unit after serving for six years as a consultant and auxiliary member of the X-Men, a group he belonged to prior to the federalizing of X-Factor. He was the younger brother of X-Men leader Scott Summers, known as Cyclops, and is thought to be related to Nathan Summers, the driving force behind both the Battle at Akkaba and the radical changes that have taken place since then. 

"Alexander Summers, who was thirty-four, leaves behind a wife." 

"And a child," Lily whispered as the television switched off into silence, hand reflexively going to her belly.

"I'm sorry, Lily," Orly said as she put down the remote. "I didn't think to realize that it might have made the national newscast..."

"Don't apologize," Lily told her, pulling her legs up and curling into as tight a ball as she dared. She was huddled under a thick woolen blanket - a gift Piotr had given them when he was living in Scotland - despite the usually overwhelming heat from the radiators. The apartment was never and they normally kept the top of the windows open a bit to ease the stuffiness. Alex would leave the windows fully open all the time if he had his druthers. But now, of course... "It's not like not hearing it would change anything."

"True," Orly admitted, looking over her shoulder back at the kitchen where she was making dinner. "But there's no need to have it thrust in your face any more than it is."

Despite what the news had said, X-Factor wasn't merely hoping for the best. The two telepaths who had been at Akkaba both said the same thing - they hadn't felt Alex die. They had felt his astral presence disappear, but it wasn't the same. Sulven, Jean had told Lily, was sure that Alex was alive somewhere. The question was where and when and how they could get him back. There had to be a reason that he was gone and that the people closest to him when the explosion had happened - an explosion completely out of proportion with the amount of plasma he was using and his level of expertise - were all still alive and in relatively good condition. 

On the face of it, it sounded easy - especially after Logan, Sulven, Nathan, and the others had disappeared the other year. But although they took care to whisper quietly so that Lily wouldn't hear, she knew it wasn't easy at all. It wasn't a time-space portal that had taken her husband. It was something new and unknown and perhaps not nearly as forgiving as the time stream. There probably wouldn't be any curt messages from stiff Askani sisters telling her that Alex would be returned when he had completed his mission and not before. There probably wouldn't be any news at all. Alex was gone without a trace.

Nathan had gotten her things from Joe Perotelli (in whose car she had left her travel bag) and teleported her home the previous evening, staying with her and not saying much of anything - a fact that Lily was eternally grateful for - until Piotr had shown up, followed shortly by Orly. Lily wasn't sure how they had been reached, especially Orly, but hadn't really cared. She had sat on the couch, exactly where she was now, as the numbness spread until she had felt like she was swaddled in thick cotton - nothing reached her right away, nothing registered. Tea was pressed into her hands, phone calls were made quietly in the background, and still Lily had felt nothing. 

Eventually, Orly had packed her off to bed, but Lily hadn't really slept. She had gotten in on Alex's side, smelling his shampoo on his pillow, grasping for anything that would let her pretend that he was just away and not gone. The bed was cold - it was always cold when Alex was away at work, the only time that Lily ever used the comforter - and she had kept being woken up by nightmares. All of Alex - Alex drowning in a river and her trying to save him, Alex tripping and falling into a ravine just an inch too far away from where she could grab him before he disappeared, Alex packing up his gear as he had that morning and Lily trying to convince him not to go and him laughing at her fears. After the last one, Lily had given up on sleep, getting up gently to avoid disturbing Orly, who was dozing on the side of the bed that Lily usually slept on, and Felix, who had climbed into the bed between them. 

She had gone into the kitchen to make tea, waking Piotr even though she had been careful to catch the kettle before the whistle was audible. He had been sleeping on the couch and came into the kitchen and sat with her. They were quiet for a while, sitting with their tea, and then Piotr started telling her about Dallas. Lily had known a little of the story - mostly what she had seen on the news at the time as neither Alex nor any of the other survivors were too eager to talk about it. 

She hadn't known that Piotr wasn't supposed to be there, that he was supposed to be in Scotland, that it was just a series of coincidences that had saved his life in the Morlock Massacre only to ask him to give it up weeks later in Dallas. Piotr said that he wasn't the only accidental tourist that day - there had been no reason for Alex to have been there, or Madelyne, or Longshot or Betsy either. The formal X-Men team, depleted by injury and retirement and still reeling from what had happened in the tunnels, wouldn't have been enough to stop the world from ending. But they had been provided for. That was the way it went with the X-Men. You learned to stop asking why, to just put your head down and do your job and leave the questions to hindsight. Because what lay ahead was never in plain sight anyway. 

The only way to stay sane was to not think about it too much, Piotr had told her. To mourn the losses and celebrate the triumphs as if they were isolated incidences, not part of a pattern. You didn't think about whether things would be different, or undone, or worse in a day's time. It was true that Alex show could up tomorrow or next week and they'd all feel a little embarrassed amidst their relief, but Piotr told her that Alex, of all people, would not want Lily to spend her life sitting and waiting for him to return. He'd want her to move forward, to go on, and he'd do his best to catch up to her. Because that, too, was the way of the X-Men. "And, like it or not, you are one of us now," Piotr had said. 

At some point, they had gone back to the living room and Lily had dozed a while, waking up to find Felix by her side and Jean and Scott talking to Piotr in hushed tones in the kitchen. They had been in Akkaba when it had happened and had spent the time since the explosion checking out any possible lead in his disappearance. Brunch had been made, the thoughtful quiet broken by random anecdotes of Alex and chatter about the upcoming arrival of the Wisdoms. Scott and Jean had gone home, but would be back tomorrow morning. Piotr had gone shopping, insisting on doing that before he, too, went home for the night. 

The afternoon had been spent back on the couch, Lily logging into Alex's email account and unsubscribing him from his mailing lists and forwarding addresses that she'd need to contact employers and friends. Lily had felt guilty doing it, even despite Piotr's talk earlier. It was like it was some sort of official recognition that there was no hope. Orly had told her that it wasn't - Alex was not going to come back, whenever he came back, and want to read old messages about T-Rex and David Bowie. 

The comfortable fuzziness was gone now, replaced by a chill that she could feel in her bones and that had nothing to do with the windows open to the December weather. Lily didn't want to eat, but choked down parts of whatever anyone gave her, mindful of the fact that Alex's most lasting legacy was currently growing in her belly. She had started to fret about the doctor's appointment - what if she did anything to jeopardize the baby, Alex's baby, but Jean had reassured her, telling her that Cecilia would be by later to check on her and they'd reschedule the appointment with the Ob-Gyn.  

The little Christmas tree that she and Alex had bought on 110th was dark now, the lights unplugged. They had decorated it with lights and little glass balls and tinsel that they'd had to re-do because Felix kept pawing it and they had dutifully watered it and put back the barricade of early presents so Felix wouldn't think of it as an auxiliary water bowl. Idly Lily wondered what she'd do with the B-movie encyclopedia she'd already gotten for Alex, wondered what she'd do with the rest of the Christmas presents for him that were ordered and en route. Two weeks until Christmas and the world was getting ready to celebrate while she prepared to mourn. 

"Lily," Orly said, sounding like this wasn't the first time she had called for her. "Your father's on the phone."

Lily made a surprised face - her father was in the middle of a training exercise and Scott had gotten into a rather heated argument with the Admiral who wouldn't patch the call through. 

"Hi," she said, amazed at how shaky her voice was. After that first bout of sobbing when it was just her and Nathan, there had been nothing. No tears. Jean had cried, but she hadn't.

"How are you doing?" Daniel Beck's voice sounded tinny and distant. 

"I'm okay," she said. Or tried to. Her voice broke and a gasp escaped. "I'm as well as to be expected." This time, she had to take a deep breath mid-sentence. "Even if it doesn't sound like it." She didn't know why talking to her father was bringing all of her emotions to the surface like this - or why they had been able to be kept back with Orly or Piotr or anyone else.

"We're done here soon," he said, sounding concerned even as it sounded like he had to shout a bit to be heard. "I'll come up there once we're back."

Lily, not trusting her voice any more, made a noise of agreement. 

"I love you, sweetheart," he said. "I have to go - I'm not supposed to be calling out in the first place."

"I love you, too, Dad," Lily replied. 

She had barely hung up the phone before the sobbing overcame her.

* * *

"Good morning boys and girls. I am Professor Summers and this is Advanced Fluid Dynamics, undergraduate style. If you did not know this, then I highly suggest you double-check your course book because if you do not recognize me, then you are probably in the wrong classroom."

The fifty-plus people in the lecture hall let out a collective chuckle as a young man in a turban cried out in surprise and gathered his things and fled. Lily allowed herself a smile, although she wasn't laughing at the confused student. For the first time in more than a month, Lily was in some place familiar, some place untouched by Alex's disappearance. And the relief was almost tangible.

Christmas had been a horror. She had been a wreck - alternating between bouts of unbearable anguish that she couldn't purge and a strange guilt for having wrecked everyone else's holiday season. She had tried to keep herself busy - going to the doctor, going up to school three times a week to go swimming and do research (she had found that she really couldn't work in the study now, not with Alex's yellow M&M plush-toy sitting on his desk smiling at her), and undoing what had been shaping up to be a great holiday. Gifts had had to be intercepted and those that could be returned to their senders without hurt feelings were. She had bought a fresh stack of cards to send out because she didn't want to mail the ones that Alex had bought and signed and left for her to sign and mail. She hadn't thrown his away, however. They were on his desk, along with the rest of his papers and the two academic journals that had arrived because the subscriptions hadn't been cancelled in time.

"All right, now that you all have been dutifully warned, I am going to pass out the syllabus. Take one and only one because I didn't print out many extras. If you lose your copy, you can first come crawling to me and beg humble forgiveness and then you can go to the class webpage - the URL is on the top of the first page of the syllabus, right under my email address - and print off a new one." 

What should have been the worst day was what would have been their third wedding anniversary. It was three weeks to the day after Alex disappeared and Lily had been at a loss. She suspected that she might have returned what would have been her present from Alex while she was sending back Christmas gifts - there had been a package addressed to him from a jewelers that Lily had had to take to the Post Office and get insurance for the return postage. On the day itself, Scott had shown up without warning to take her to dinner. He had chosen a nice restaurant and they had gotten a table in a quiet corner and Scott had spent the meal telling her stories about Alex. Some from when they were children - the time he and Alex had run away from home and their mother had packed them a picnic basket - and some were from more recent times. Alex and Scott had never really been on the same team at the same time and Scott had the perspective of distance. Lily had spent the meal either laughing or crying and sometimes both and, in hindsight, thought it had been as good for Scott as it had been for her.

"We are going to spend this session doing a quick review of what we did last semester - what took you guys four months to memorize will now take you an hour to remember... Get your notebook out, Amitav. I'm not letting you out early."

In general, cleaning up after Alex (a horrible, horrible turn of phrase that had once been playful - it was Alex who was usually cleaning up after her) had been done with an ease that disgusted her. After the first laundry, there were none of his clothes to handle. After almost six weeks, the personal and professional mail had been reduced to a trickle and the junk mail went into the trash without too close an examination of the intended party. She checked his email once a week and it was usually only spam, although she had a form letter she would send out should anyone real write to him. 

It was in the little things that Alex's absence was most keenly felt. The way that food and cat litter didn't appear if she didn't buy it (after the first time Jean and Scott had gone food shopping for her without telling her, Lily had turned on them with rare anger). The darkness of the apartment when she came home in the evening. The way every little noise drew her attention because none of the sounds could be attributed to the white noise that came with living with someone. The cold bed. 

At school, however, things were almost normal. Alex had only ever been a rare visitor up here and while members of her department knew, she didn't run into them often enough during the intersession for it to matter. The department secretary was her usual solicitous self and the issue that had hung over Lily's head since last semester - which would come first, the end of the spring term or the arrival of the baby - would still have to be addressed. One of Lily's colleagues, an elder statesman of the department who had been around back when City College was called Harvard on the Hudson and was home to some of the city's most respected public intellectuals, had surprised the hell out of her last week by offering to cover her sections should it prove necessary. 

Today, the class session passed smoothly. It was the third time she was teaching this course and, combined with her familiarity with the students she was instructing from the previous semester, there was no reason to expect surprises. As far as her students knew, this semester was just like the previous one. If any of them wondered about whether their professor would go into labor in the middle of illustrating something on the blackboard, none of them were going to say anything. 

After class ended, she spent fifteen minutes answering individual questions and signing permission forms for students who needed access to the sub-sonic wind tunnel at the lab. She went down to the EFMA lab herself afterwards and re-confirmed the appointments she had set up to do demonstrations with the rotating mirror machine (the work-study students who handled bookings tended to actually get things correct if they had the professor looming over them), afterwards getting mildly distracted by the SPARC 10 workstation they had revamped over the intersession before returning to her office. To her relief, there were only four students waiting for her and none of them was trying to get her to authorize an override approval for her course. 

Lily didn't leave Steinman until after five, even as she could hear Alex's voice in her head warning her about heading to the subway alone after dark. The area was essentially safe, Alex had known that, but there was just enough level of threat for concern. She got home, fed Felix and herself, returned Xiao's phone call, watered the two plants that had been given to them by Ororo before she moved down to Antarctica, and spent the better part of a half hour trying to find something nice in her wardrobe that didn't make her look like she had swallowed a small city. She was at an annoying stage where she didn't look obviously pregnant and could be mistaken for just being fat. And that, for very shallow reasons, bothered her. Eventually, she opted for the scoop necked velvet dress on the premise that empire waists made everyone look pregnant anyway.

It had gotten cold yesterday after being unseasonably warm for late January and Lily bundled up with a hat and scarf and gloves before grabbing her purse and heading off. In deference to the weather, she changed at Times Square for the N to Prince Street and then walked from there rather than just taking the 1 down to Christopher Street. The gallery was on Spring Street just east of West Broadway, which turned out to be right after Wooster. Jean met her at the door, which was still locked to the public, and showed her where to store her things. 

"Everyone's trickling in," Jean said as Lily followed her to a back room. "Well, everyone who could make it tonight."

Tonight. A momentous occasion for many reasons. Not the least of which was that this was Lily's first social event after Alex's disappearance. She had steeled herself against the sympathetic looks she knew would be forthcoming.

But this night was not about her. Settled into his apartment, Piotr was also settling into civilian life again. Even before he had returned to the States, Piotr had quietly looked up the gallery owner who had shown most of Peter Nicholas's work and asked if he thought that it would be a good thing to resolve the mystery that had surrounded Nicholas's disappearance more than a decade ago. The gallery owner had simply asked when he wanted to start showing his work. 

Lily had heard of Peter Nicholas and had remembered his disappearance. She had been living in Cambridge at the time and one of her roommates' boyfriends had been into the whole contemporary art thing. While she certainly appreciated Piotr's abilities, art was not something she had spent a whole lot of time contemplating. But seeing him so excited was more than worth an evening wandering around pretending she knew chiaroscuro from prosciutto.    

The noise and lights were upon them as soon as she entered the large room. There were a couple dozen people already there, about half of whom she knew. Immediately she found Kurt and Amanda talking to Elisabeth Braddock Worthington, whom Lily knew she was still allowed to call Betsy. 

"Warren's around somewhere," Jean said. "Probably trying to pry Scott and Rogue out of whatever corners they're trying to hide in."

After Peter Nicholas's disappearance, courtesy of Charles Xavier and the Shadow King, his art had soared in value and Joseph Grinnell had made a small fortune selling it. Of course, they were not really Grinnell's to sell - a matter that had been settled by Warren Worthington's attorneys on Piotr's behalf. According to Piotr, while he hadn't liked that Grinnell was going to profit, Warren had been some sort of morally outraged and was adamant about taking action where Piotr had been more laid-back. Lily knew that there was some scheme that Alex had only known vague details about and of which Piotr had known none. It had produced a large bank account that had sat waiting for Piotr and Peter to meet again. That bank account was now being used to help pay for renovations to the loft apartment.

News that Peter Nicholas was alive had sent shockwaves through the New York art scene and the show (all of the works save three were being loaned by their current owners; Piotr had not had much time to create new pieces) had landed on the front page above the fold in the _Times_ ' weekend arts section. The news that Peter Nicholas was Piotr Nikoleivich Rasputin, recently retired member of both Excalibur and the X-Men, would doubtless cause more gossip later tonight.

"Lily!" Piotr called quietly across the room, breaking away from a group of people Lily didn't recognize. "I'm so glad that you came," he said, hugging her as tightly as he dared. 

"Wouldn't miss this for anything," she replied with a smile, genuinely meaning it. They hadn't had that much time to simply socialize since his return to New York - almost all of their time had been spent fiddling with the apartment-studio. And then Alex... But Piotr had been there for her, and for that Lily was grateful. He was now her friend too, she'd like to think, rather than just one of Alex's. 

"I am glad for that," Piotr told her earnestly. "Not only because it is you, but also because, well, any friendly face is a welcome one."

"You're nervous?" Lily asked with some surprise as Piotr extended his elbow so that she could loop her arm around his. They walked back not to where he had been standing, but towards where Kurt, Amanda, and Betsy were sipping white wine and chatting. 

"I am," Piotr admitted. "And not just because I am going to turn Peter Nicholas into Colossus... I know that much of the fascination with Peter Nicholas is in his disappearance, not in his art. I don't want to be the one telling all of the magician's tricks, you know?"

"Piotr, you are a fantastic artist and you were making a name for yourself before you disappeared from the scene," Lily told him, pulling him gently to a stop so that he'd look down at her. "Don't tell me differently. I was there. And, quite frankly, any mystique lost by Peter Nicholas returning from oblivion is going to be regained by Peter Nicholas turning out to be Colossus. Not many of the folks being shown in galleries down here can say that they took a sabbatical from being a starving artist to go save the world."

"Oh, don't fall victim to his tricks, Lily," Kurt Wagner told her as they joined the trio, exchanging greetings. "It is merely Piotr's attempt at a sympathy ploy. The man is suddenly the toast of New York again and he has developed an ego appropriate to his build. He is just milking us all for as much as he can," Kurt teased. He was resplendent in a well-cut dark navy Italian suit that made his indigo fur almost gleam. An obviously proud (and just as well-appointed) Amanda stood next to him, shaking her head in silent bemusement. She was quite used to Piotr and Kurt's verbal jousting. 

"Pah," Betsy snorted indelicately, pulling back an escaped tendril of hair with an elegant fingertip. "Whatever means of preening Piotr has learned have come from you."

Betsy had retired from active duty at the same time Warren had, after Akkaba, although they were both still heavily involved in the cause. Betsy used her social position in both London and New York (hence the switch to the more formal appellation) to raise funds to create educational and medical facilities for the astonishing number of psionic children being born after the Merge - including the devastatingly high numbers abandoned at birth. Lily thought the change from scantily-clad Psylocke to elegantly styled social doyenne would have been more abrupt than it was, but, as Alex had reminded her, Betsy had been born into the life to which she was now returning. 

"You are looking lovely, by the way," Kurt said to Lily as he pointedly turned up his nose away from Betsy. "Pregnancy, dare I say, suits you."

"Pregnancy suits no one, Kurt," Lily retorted, touching her belly lightly. "But I thank you."

A hidden voice calling for Piotr interrupted the banter and he made his apologies before going off to find out who needed him. 

"I'm really happy for him," Betsy said as she watched him disappear behind the small group conversing by the entryway. "Of all of us who went through the Siege Perilous, Piotr was the only one who ended up in a happy place. It was the cosmos's way of rewarding him and I'm so... relieved, I think, to see him finally able to enjoy that reward. I can feel the rightness of this. I think the cosmos is happy, too."

Rogue, looking mildly uncomfortable in a trendy pants-and-tunic combination, joined them then and the conversation turned to less weighty matters. She had them all drawing stares with their raucous laughter as she detailed the mad hunt she and Bobby had gone on so that Bobby could find his Deluxe Edition boxed set of the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. ("I don't know why he couldn't've just ordered it from Amazon like everyone else.") 

Eventually Joseph Grinnell, a thin man in his fifties who wore the local uniform of black slacks and matching turtleneck, clapped his hands together to draw everyone's attention. He said that the doors would be opening to the invited guests in ten minutes and everyone should make their way to the gallery showroom at their leisure. 

Lily felt a pang of heartache as she watched the people she knew pair off - Warren (resplendent in his dark tuxedo and white wings) came to collect Betsy, Jean and Scott appeared, Joseph was spotted near Rogue, and Kurt gallantly escorted Amanda into the showroom. She was never alone - in fact, if Lily weren't in as good a mood she might have suspected some covertly organized hovering - but she felt the absence of Alex acutely. 

In the years that she had known Piotr, Lily had seen him express his artistry constantly and in many formats. He had sketched for the twins when they were babies and spent quality time with them now that they were older coloring with crayons. He had drawn capable, if untechnical, blueprints for the electricians who had been rewiring his apartment. He had helped Alex re-finish the oak cabinet they had gotten to hide the television and used a delicate little brush to treat the brass finishings. He had painted and decorated his own home so that its loft origins were almost hard to imagine. But she had never seen him work on canvas. 

Even as an acknowledged layman when it came to art, at first glance into the showroom Lily could see why there was such a buzz about Piotr's work. While the paintings were indisputably modern, they were very... retro in their style, full of traditional colors and motifs without coming across as recycled or derivative. 

The gallery was a series of geometrically shaped rooms strung together and after Lily had traversed the oval, the square, and the hexagon, she could appreciate why the return of Peter Nicholas had been so warmly received. Piotr had not tried to be Picasso; he had tried to be Caravaggio. And in a world where flinging animal feces on a canvas was being called art, there was something deeply attractive about not attempting to screech out self-professed profundity and genius with every brushstroke. This was art about love. 

"Oh my goodness," Jean said in a quiet voice as she came up to Lily, gesturing subtly with her hand. "I didn't think there would be any from the Callisto Series here."

Lily followed Jean's finger to a trio of portraits across the showroom. The last two were hard to see, the angle making the glare from the track lighting almost blinding. But the first one was a three-quarter profile of an impossibly beautiful woman, black hair cascading over her shoulder as she looked slightly behind her, dark eyes smiling over a joke that was probably lost to time.

"What's wrong with them?" Lily asked curiously. From his sketches for the children Lily knew that Piotr had an ability to render his imagination vividly, but she was sure that the portrait was of a real person and not an imagined one. And that made her wonder who she was - that was not a casual look on the model's face. 

"Callisto..." Jean began and then sighed. "She was the de facto leader of the Morlocks. A fierce, proud woman. Ororo fought her for the leadership of the Morlocks once and killed her. Not permanently."

Lily knew of the Morlocks - had known of them even before her rather shocking introduction to Marrow at the mansion some years back. They had come above ground after the Merge and while many of them lived in New York (there was a Morlock neighborhood in Jersey City, New Jersey, too), Ororo had been fairly preoccupied with a mass immigration to the New Lands when Lily and Alex had been up visiting the previous year. Marrow, now calling herself Sarah Marrow, was a film student at NYU and had made a documentary of the Morlock Massacre that had garnered rave reviews at the one film festival where it had been shown thus far and there was talk of a distribution deal. Ororo and Remy were quite proud of her. 

"She's very beautiful," Lily commented, feeling that the world was inadequate, but couldn't come up with anything better. It wasn't the face of someone who'd fight to the death, though. 

"She was, for a while," Jean agreed cryptically. When Lily gestured for her to continue, Jean nodded but took a moment to speak again. "What happened to Piotr to turn him into Peter Nicholas sort of also happened to Callisto. Except it was part of a plan to overthrow her and it wasn't meant to be a gift... They wiped her memory and changed her features and left her a beautiful amnesiac and that's how Peter Nicholas found her - and fell in love with her."

Lily reacted with surprise. She knew about Piotr's ill-fated love affair with Kitty Pryde, but Piotr in general was so circumspect about that part of his life that to hear anything about it almost felt like gossip.

"She was his muse, I guess you'd say," Jean went on. "They were happy together, so happy. I was part of the original X-Factor then and we had to give them shelter for a bit... Oh, Lily. If you had seen Piotr then, you'd never have recognized him. And then shit happens, like it always does, and Piotr had to lose everything and come back to us... Callisto eventually found out what had happened to her and went back to the way she was, both in spirit and in body... She's been a much harder-edged person ever since. They're both haunted by that time in their lives. Except Piotr's worked towards getting back to that place and Callisto's worked on forgetting it."

Lily nodded. She didn't think Jean would appreciate the irony - the parallel between Piotr and Callisto and herself and Alex. 


	14. May 2007

"I know you've got friends who are telekinetic, but I don't think that blanket's going to get itself down from the closet by you staring at it."

Rear Admiral Daniel Beck had arrived two days ago, having orchestrated his leave around the scheduled birth of his first grandchild. Lily thought the man was entirely too cheerful. Of course, he wasn't the one with swollen feet and someone tap-dancing on his bladder.

"Thanks, Dad," she muttered, making a face at her father as she stepped back so that he could get the blanket off of the top shelf of the linen closet and shoo Felix, who loved to climb up on top of the clean sheets, away. "I don't think people were really thinking about the details when they put things away."

The move, six weeks previous, had been relatively effortless - with many of the X-types helping out, Lily had done nothing more strenuous than pack dishes - but it had been emotionally wrenching. She was moving out of the place where she had lived with Alex. True, they had bought the new apartment together, talked about furniture placement and repainting options, but the old apartment had his warmth, even if it was all in her head. This one was cold, even with the formerly white walls painted over with rich colors. Putting Alex's things away in the new apartment, hanging the items in his closet, stacking his books on their shelves...Lily was glad that she had never been left alone that day. And, with the imminent arrival of their child, Lily was very grateful for her father's presence.

"Well, it'll all be within reach in a week or so," he offered as he carried the blanket back towards the foldaway bed he had opened up. The spring weather had turned sharply colder the previous night. 

"Yeah," Lily agreed unenthusiastically, following behind and sitting on the chair. "I still have to find a few things and re-arrange. I didn't want to make everyone crazy by being too particular about where they put things that weren't large pieces of furniture. I figure that's how I'll work my way back from the pregnancy weight." All fourteen pounds of it - Dana, who had delivered a baby boy named Nathan (Lily had kept her amusement about Alex's exhortation to stay away from naming children after Summerses to herself) three weeks ago, had been rather jealous. The doctor said it was perfectly fine and was a reflection of the extremely healthy diet she had been following.

"Well, I like the place," Daniel replied as he unfolded the blanket. "It looks like someone lives here. 'Nothing dorm-like or temporary about it,' says the man who has had his share of nights sleeping in the engine room."

"No, just a little empty," Lily said quietly. She looked up to see her father watching her carefully. "I know, I know, there will be pattering little feet around here that don't belong to my obese cat and it won't seem so bad..."

"Oh, Tigerlily," he said and Lily smiled at the childhood name, "Nobody expects you to not be thinking of Alex right now. This is going to be his child, too."

"At least we had the names picked out. More or less," Lily added wistfully. 

"Do I get a sneak preview?" Daniel asked, moving back to sit on the edge of the bed. 

"Nope." Lily didn't dare tell her father that she and Alex had narrowed down the choices for a boy's name to Daniel (his choice) and Jacob (hers) and that if it was a boy, she was probably going to go with Alex's choice. If it was a girl, then they had agreed on Emily. If - when --  Alex came back, he would at least have that much familiarity with the child he named. 

As if on cue, the baby starting moving around and Lily had to squirm right along with it. "Kid's going to be a soccer player," she muttered. "It's ten o'clock, junior, go to sleep."

"You were feisty in the womb, too," her father told her, smiling fondly, presumably at the memories and not at her present discomfort. "Your mother was not surprised when you became a swimmer."

"Yeah, well," Lily said, waving her hand vaguely. She didn't want to talk about her mother right now. Not so soon after she had had words with her father about why she didn't want Star to be present when she gave birth. Her father had not deemed Lily's fear of the baby being fed soymilk and herbal-based formula a good enough excuse, which was fair enough because it wasn't even the truth. She had not tried to explain anything to her mother and Star hadn't asked, although Lily was sure that her parents had spoken about things.

"I have to admit," Daniel said as he stood up again. "I'm a little uneasy with the whole routine for when you go into labor. Teleportation, telepathy...Maybe I'm just an old seaman."

Lily laughed. "You're not old, just a seaman. I'm a little weirded out by it, too," she admitted. "But it's safe and it's probably the best way to go."

The plan, such as it was, involved getting teleported to Westchester. While Lily had her own Ob-Gyn, Doctor Friedenthal had agreed that with the likelihood of the baby being a mutant and the shortage of beds in the hospitals that had already been converted to deal with mutant births, if she had alternate treatment available then it would be best that she go with it. 

"Do I get to be teleported, too?" Daniel asked curiously as he looked around for where he had hidden his pajamas. 

"I expect so," Lily replied wryly, attempting to lift herself out of the chair with her arms and failing. She knew better than to have sat down in the deep-seated chair in the first place. "Stop laughing and help me up," she groused as she realized her father was watching her. 

He did, but Lily's smile turned into a wince as a sharp pain in her back struck. "Ow," she muttered, closing her eyes and riding out the pain. Pregnancy had been a wealth of new experiences, but the amazing array of aches and pains was not one of the more interesting points.

"That wasn't the baby, was it?"

"No, that was my back," Lily answered, breathing deeply and letting go as she realized she was gripping her father's arms tightly. "I think all this walking around tilted funny is starting to get to it."

"Or it could be the start of labor," Daniel pointed out. "It's not always the uterus."

Lily pondered a moment on how... weird it was to be hearing her father talk about her uterus, then shook her head. Then she remembered that the books had said so, too. "Great. Kid's gotta be different starting before birth." 

"Well, it's a fine family tradition," Daniel replied sagely, reveling in his daughter's frown. "Just let me know if you get another one, okay?"

"Deal," she said, sighing as her father put down his pajamas. "Not hedging any bets?"

"I don't want to make my initial teleportational voyage in my skivvies." 

"Well, if this is it, it's not going to be right away," Lily said, heading in to the kitchen. "I have time to make tea."

It turned out that she had time to make tea, eat her cookie, and head into the study (which was now what should have been the dining room; the kitchen was still large enough to do double-duty) to mark some more exams before the pain became too much. The flashes of agony were still too far apart to cause any sort of panic, but Lily was sort of awed by how calmly she was taking all of this. It was almost like it was someone else who was having the baby - at least when the pain wasn't making her whimper.

Finally, at eleven-thirty, Lily called Jean. No sooner had she hung up the phone than she heard a cry of surprise from the living room. Before her father and Sulven could draw weapons on each other, Lily got out there as quickly as she could.

"Hi, Sulven," she called out as soon as she was close enough. The tiny Askani (dressed in pajamas) and her father were staring at each other menacingly. "Sulven, this is my father. Dad, this is Sulven."

Both parties relaxed noticeably and Lily shook her head. "Let me get my bag and we can go, okay?"

Sulven nodded and Lily went to retrieve her duffel bag, idly wondering why on earth Sulven had pajamas with cats on them. 

Once she had returned, she handed the bag to her father and went into the kitchen to loosen the tap in the sink. "I just want to make sure the cat has food and water."

"Your cat doesn't need any food," Sulven muttered. Lily was very disappointed that her father laughed. True as it was, Lily had gotten very defensive about Felix. Only she and Alex were allowed to make fat jokes. 

Lily had been teleported twice before, although she was only really paying attention the time Sulven had taken her to one of the secret bases of Cable's network a few months before Akkaba. Contrary to what happened in the movies, teleportation didn't feel like anything, which was part of the weirdness. In one breath you were one place and you were somewhere else the next. That she had been going from one indoor location to another had probably made it less startling - going from, say Alaska to Hawaii, now that would be interesting. Although Lily really didn't think Sulven would have the same appreciation for it. Maybe Nathan...

And so it was that a moment after closing her eyes in her apartment, Lily, her father, and Sulven were in the living room in Westchester. Logan sat on the couch with Zara dozing in his lap and Jean and Scott walked in before they could even say hello.

"Dad, this is Scott and Jean," Lily said as Scott approached, hand extended. What might have been an awkward first meeting between Cyclops and Rear Admiral Beck was cut short by a contraction that was much more intense than the previous ones have been and had her pitching forward with a half-dozen hands reaching out to catch her. "And I think they're going to be meeting their niece or nephew a little sooner than I'd thought. Oww."

Greetings were exchanged as they went through the house down to the med lab. With three-week-old Nate Guthrie being the fourth child born at the mansion, the X-Men had long gotten used to setting up a makeshift maternity room. The med lab had always had a room for non-critical patients, a cheerfully appointed room that had real furniture (apart from the hospital bed) and painted walls and enough light to almost make up for the fact that it had no windows. This was where Lily was guided and where Cecilia and Hank were waiting.

"The guest of honor hath arrived!" Hank cried out cheerfully as handed Lily a giant t-shirt. "It's a little sexier than a hospital gown," he told her when she shook it out dubiously and he shrugged artlessly when she held it up by the Avengers logo.

Looking around at the crowd who was gathering, Lily frowned. Cecilia nodded knowingly and cleared her throat. "All right people, the show doesn't start for another few hours. Get your asses out of here."

Lily smiled as her father was reluctantly herded out by Scott and then turned to face Cecilia and Hank. "Okay, so do I get to turn into a quivering mass of terror before or after I get into the t-shirt?"

"Oh, come now Professor Summers," Hank said with a smile. "You have been a model of dignity and strength thus far..."

"Thus far has only been the slow eclipse of my feet by my belly," Lily retorted as she pulled her t-shirt over her head and replaced it with the bigger one in a smooth motion. While she honestly didn't care one way or the other, she noticed that Hank turned his head. The respect for her modesty was heartening, if unnecessary. There were going to be no secrets by the time this was over. There was also going to be a baby... "Oh, wow. I think the magnitude of what's happening just hit me," she marveled, leaning back to rest her hand on the table nearest her.

Cecilia made a show of checking her watch. "Not bad, chica," she said dryly. "You split the difference between Dana and Sulven. I'd put you a little ahead of Domino, but that's mostly because she spent most of the time cursing Nathan out and it was hard to tell whether it was cursing as a form of affection or just the usual aggression."

"Young Clare is going to have quite the talent for invective," Hank agreed sagely as he waited for Lily to drop her sweatpants and drawers and re-arrange the dress-like t-shirt before gently picking her up and placing her on the bed. Cecilia pulled up the blanket and held something to her belly, then muttered something about fetal heart rate.

Cecilia and Hank explained each test and each needle and each poke and prod, but that only appeased Lily's intellect and that part of her didn't need much appeasing. Even if Lily didn't have complete faith in both Cecilia as a doctor (and a doctor who had done a successful mutant birth three weeks previous) and Hank as her overqualified assistant, Dana was around to catch any emergencies. It was ironic, Lily thought, that Dana's own delivery was considered riskier than her own. Although Dana's life in general was somewhat ironic - a natural healer married to an immortal and she couldn't use her powers on herself to extend her own life.

But none of the rationalizing and intellectual cognizance of the safety of her situation eased the growing trepidation. She was scared for herself and scared for her baby. What if something still happened to her? Who would take care of the baby? She supposed she should have come up with some sort of written instructions to go with the updated will... "Oh, my," she hissed, trying to breathe through the next contraction, accidentally kicking Hank, who was adjusting the stirrups and was thus near a temporarily-freed foot.

"No apologies necessary," Hank said after she tried to offer one, patting her hand clenched tightly around the bed railing. "My timing was less than impeccable and I have only myself to blame." 

Lily was tempted to say that she had only Alex to blame, but didn't. Because she really, really didn't want to think about him not being here right now. Or in the future with their child, the one he was so eager to have... She knew he hadn't been upset with her wanting to wait - she knew he had wanted to wait as well. But she had known all along that Alex wanted kids. As many as she would agree to. And now, even if it was by accident and not planning, she was here about to bring their child into the world and he wasn't with her... "Aughh," she whimpered, almost thankful that the contraction had come to distract her. "I think I've had enough of this pregnancy thing. Stop the ride, I want to get off."

"Hang on, Lily," Cecilia told her, her voice absent of the clipped tone that went with her professional manner. "You've held on for nine months and it's almost over. The baby's looking fine, everything's normal for both of you, and it won't be too long now."

"You are giving birth to a Summers and they are always prompt. There are certain perquisites to that," Hank added. 

"It's only after the baby's born that you've got a problem," Scott said from the doorway, holding up a hand in defense as Cecilia wheeled to face him. "I was sent as the emissary to see if everything's all right. I'm not sure if they picked me because I'm expendable or because they were counting on you two not harming me out of some vague respect for the chain of command."

"The former," Cecilia told him as she went back to checking a monitor. "You might as well let them come in if it's all right with Lily."

"I can use the distraction," Lily admitted, brushing her bangs back. "But I want everyone aware that I am _not_ giving birth with an audience." She had heard about the festive party-like atmosphere that had surrounded Dana's delivery of Nathan three weeks ago and had been... if not necessarily horrified, then at least disturbed. This was not something she wanted to do in public. It was going to be weird enough with her father present.

"Deal," Scott assured her. "Jean'll use telepathic and telekinetic force if necessary."

Mindful of Lily's wishes - suspiciously mindful, which made her wonder just what Scott had told people - Lily's visitors kept themselves few in number and mild in attitude. At some point Piotr arrived and jokingly offered his steel arm for her to use as a stress reliever before presenting her with a plushie penguin toy that he said could be put to the same use. He stayed with her and her father and Jean and Scott, leaning against the wall in order to stay out of Cecilia's way until Hank announced that perhaps it was time to summon Dana as Lily's cervix was "pleasantly dilated." It wasn't until after Piotr had kissed her forehead and muttered something in Russian that sounded like a prayer before taking his leave that Lily noticed that the plushie penguin was wearing a crucifix obviously meant for her. It was silver and it looked old and Lily, baptized and confirmed a Catholic once upon a time, fingered it and tried to remember as much of the Pater Noster as she could before another contraction hit.

Scott, typically reserved, squeezed her hand and told her in no uncertain terms that she'd be fine, that Alex - wherever he was - would be proud of her for her strength. He squeezed Jean's shoulder meaningfully on his way out, but if anything else was said Lily didn't know as she had stopped paying attention as the pain peaked. The contractions felt like her body was fighting itself, pushing her to expel all of her internal organs at once, and Lily tried to assure herself that this was all natural and nothing wrong was happening to the baby. 

"Just us and the docs," Her father said from his stool after Lily could breathe again. Hank had parked him on a tall stool at the head of Lily's bed so that she didn't have to turn too much to see him. Realizing he was right, she smiled weakly at him and then turned as Dana, dressed in what passed for (in the Shi'ar fabricator) as medical scrubs, entered. Conscious of the fact that she was the official backup plan, the last resort, and especially sympathetic to Lily's nerves and plight, she hung back, sitting down on the stool at the far end of the room. 

As another contraction began, Cecilia said something to Jean and then all of a sudden, the pain stopped even as Lily could feel her uterus spasm. Her cry of anguish turned into one of surprise. 

"Sorry," Jean explained as she came to her side. "I didn't mean to do that unannounced. I couldn't block off your pain receptors until you got to a certain point in your labor. This is much more effective than an epidural and much safer for you and the baby. It'll hold until the baby's born, but I'm going to have to release it right after so Hank and Cecilia can make sure everything's all right. You'll get a break from the worst of the pain, though."

Gasping for air that suddenly was much more available and much cooler, Lily nodded. 

"Perks of being related to a telepath," Daniel mused thoughtfully. "Makes anesthesiology a whole new ballfield."

"All right, Lily," Cecilia said. "Now you get to push. Just don't try to pop the baby out at once."

Lily did anyway. It felt weird and uncomfortable in a way that had nothing to do with the nonexistent pain (although the absence itself made it all the more strange) and everything to do with the very real idea that she was putting a watermelon through a keyhole. 

Free to think clearly again - it was very strange to feel the motions of contractions without the accompanying pain - Lily had her wits about her again in enough time to catch the smothered snort of laughter that Cecilia had done her best to hide.

"What the hell could be so funny about my cervix?" she asked. 

"Doctor Reyes and I had wondered about what the baby would present first," Hank explained in a smooth voice. Deceptively smooth. "The head has presented, all as it should be."

"You two had a _bet_ about whether my child would breech?" Lily asked, outrage warring with surprise. She nonetheless followed Cecilia's silent exhortation for her to push again as the contraction began.

"Not a wager and nothing so indecorous," Hank assured her, standing up so that Lily could better see him and his sincere expression. "In our admittedly small sampling of mutant births, we have noticed that positioning has been less than ideal. We thought it odd, both in terms of the general population and in terms of the fact that all of the children so far have been psionically gifted and perhaps might have sensed the proper positioning. Push, please? ...But, admittedly out of perversity, we had both suggested to the other prior to your arrival that you and your child would be different - and you have proven us correct. It is a good thing, Lily. A very good thing... Push, that's a girl!"

Cecilia was going to catch the baby, so she moved into position as Hank stripped off a layer of plastic gloves and double-checked the warming bed and the bulb syringe and other tools for the baby. Lily watched him intently, not wanting to pay too much attention to Cecilia after she heard the word 'episiotomy.' Her father was holding her left hand in his and brushing her hair back with his right, not saying anything but offering his presence. 

Exhortations to push and hold back were answered as best Lily could, but even without the pain it was becoming harder to follow directions. After so many hours, her body was tired and wanted to do one thing and Cecilia was demanding that she do another and her mind was having a hard time convincing her body that it really should listen to the good doctor.

Finally, Cecilia announced that the crown was through and Lily cried out in relief. It took a long moment for the shoulder to come through - Cecilia muttering in half-Spanish about last minute indecision - and then came the most unpleasant feeling of voiding followed by intense relief and cries of exultation from the other side of the drape. 

"Congratulations, Mrs. Summers, it's a little scientist," Hank crowed delightedly as he clamped the cord. "It's a boy, Lily! And I have to say, if it weren't obvious that Alex was the father, it would be obvious that Alex was the father."

Lily's relief turned into a mass of conflicted emotions - the arrival of her son - her _son_ \-- and the acute pain of missing his father... She was crying helplessly before she knew it. Her father was hovering over her head, kissing her forehead and whispering words that really didn't need to be heard to be understood and she was too lost to clearly hear Hank until she felt pressure on her abdomen and remembered that she had one push left and that Jean had to remove the blocks and an intense wave of pain washed over her as the third stage of labor was completed. It was as it should have been - her brain suddenly being made aware that her body had just been through hours of hell. 

But any concern she had for herself faded when she heard Cecilia curse in Spanish. "Oh, my stars and garters," Hank murmured in awe.

"What?" Lily cried out even as she heard her son - Daniel - cry out his first breaths. "What's the matter?!? Let me see him! What is it?"  
   
"It's all right, Lily," Jean said and Lily turned to her, having completely forgotten that she was in the room. 

"Then why can't I see him?" Anguish and fear raced through her - what had she done wrong that her baby was having problems? What if she lost Alex's son... "What's going on?"

"Junior here set off my force field the moment we cleared his airways," Cecilia said with a preternatural calm that gave off just the hint of strain as if she was preoccupied. "And it's taking us a little longer than it should to check him out. But he's healthy as a horse, Lily. Really and truly. Ten fingers and ten toes and blue eyes and a tiny bit of blond hair. He's also a fidget and we can't lay him down on the warming table just yet... Dana, there should be a rubber-backed foam pad in the top drawer of the table you're sitting next to. Bring it here, please?"

"Let me help," Jean suggested, walking around Lily to where Cecilia was holding the baby. "I've got a little experience with hard-to-hold babies."

Even as she struggled to sit up, Lily couldn't see anything and her anxiety was increasing with each moment. Finally, the baby was carefully lifted telekinetically out of Cecilia's hands and wrapped immediately in the blanket Hank was holding. The little blue cap was placed snugly on and the entire ensemble was floated slowly over to Lily, who fairly grabbed him out of the air. She cradled him in her left arm and took a good look. 

"Oh, Alex," she whispered, coughing out a sob as she wiped away tears from her eyes with her free hand. He should be here. He should be with her looking down at their baby who looked just like him. Daniel. She ran a finger down his still-damp cheek and he turned towards it, tiny mouth slightly open. She ran her thumb across his tiny palms, checking the fingers for herself. "Heya, kiddo," she said to him. "Welcome to life on the outside."

"Lily?" 

She started when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was her father, looking awed and full of love. Lily blinked, having honestly lost track of the fact that there were other people around.

"Now that you've got a hold on him," Hank said quietly as he approached. "And I'd really like to know how that's possible, but that will wait. I need to drop in the silver nitrate now. Can you hold his head still for me?"

Lily did and he did and little Daniel didn't seem too thrilled with the process, but it was over quickly and Lily looked up at Hank and Cecilia. "What's wrong with him?"

"He manifested," Cecilia said simply as she held out a stethoscope to check first Daniel's and then Lily's heartbeat, her force field glowing slightly at the contact. "He's some sort of energy producer. It feels like an electrical shock, but that could just be the effect he had on my force field. Although I don't know why he's not doing anything in your arms - or how you can even hold him. Maybe the familial link goes further than we suspected? I don't know and this isn't the time to think about it."

"Lily?" Dana asked from the side, a smile on her face. "Does Junior have a name?"

Lily smiled. "Everyone, this is Daniel Bae Summers. Daniel, this is everyone. Or some of everyone."

"Daniel?" her father squawked, standing up from where he had been hunched over his grandson, holding one tiny hand between his fingers. "But... But... No. Why did you name him after me?"

"It wasn't me," Lily explained calmly, holding Daniel a little closer. "It was Alex's choice. I had a different name in mind, but I liked this one. If he turns out like you, then I'll be happy and I'm sure Alex will be, too."

Daniel (the elder) was torn between embarrassment and continued protest and extreme humility and he just shook his head and wiped away a tear.

"Okay, the warming table is set up," Dana announced, breaking up the mood with the timing that only an empath could have. 

"Then let's put him down for a few minutes," Cecilia said. It was a suggestion, but it was one that wasn't going to be refused. "He needs to get settled and we have a few more tests we're going to have to figure out how to run if the electricity comes back on and you have a few more tests to take as well."

With one last kiss for her baby boy, Lily let Jean telekinetically take him away to his warming bed. Now that the excitement was over and she knew Daniel was safe, Lily let the exhaustion take over. She leaned back in bed and let Hank and Cecilia do as they would, idly watching her father and Jean and Dana watch the baby in his bed. She felt sore and trampled and drained, utterly drained, and more tired than she could ever imagine. Eventually, she just closed her eyes and listened. Daniel had stopped crying and presumably gone to sleep and the last thing she heard before falling asleep herself was the piercing alarm of one of the medical monitors still attached to her arm.

* * *

"Lily?"

Lily muttered something about letting someone who had just delivered a baby sleep for a while when a tiny cry woke her up completely, reminding her without words that someone else had had a rough night, too.

"I'm up," she muttered, opening her eyes and blinking away the brightness of the lights. 

"Thank you," she heard her father muttering and looked at him. He was looking up at the ceiling as if in prayer. Piotr was standing next to him, leaning against the wall casually but looking concerned. Jean and Scott were there as well, all of them out of the way of Hank and Cecilia, both of whom were practically hovering. Even groggy, Lily could feel the tension and knew that it was centered around her - and thankfully not the baby.

"How long was I out for?" She asked, moving carefully to sit up and finding that it was easy. Suspiciously easy considering how much pain she'd been in earlier and she felt panic rise up. She moved to sit up further and she felt a hand on her shoulder pulling her back down. "What's going on?"

"There was a complication," Cecilia said simply, stepping back as Jean telekinetically brought the crying Daniel over from where he had been lying, the others standing back even as they craned to take a look. His face was screwed up in distress and he was bright red for his efforts. "You hemorrhaged."

"I did?" Lily felt a little like Snow White catching up after her nap. Especially as she noticed that she was not wearing the same t-shirt she had fallen asleep in. Instead, she was in a baseball-style pajama shirt with buttons down the front and she could feel underwear and what were probably the matching bottoms. She looked down at Daniel, relieved that he still looked like a newborn, that she hadn't been unconscious long enough to miss anything. 

Daniel, who was safe in her arms and apparently quite hungry. She put the tip of her little finger by his mouth and he turned and stopped crying as he tried to suck on it... Oh. "Umm. I get a lesson in this, right?"

There was an amused chuckled by the group surrounding her, one that was laced still with some unease. 

"I think this is where we bow out gracefully, guys," Scott said from where he was standing. Piotr and Daniel (the elder) muttering agreement. "We'll see you after someone's had breakfast," he told her. Lily noticed that he was still in the clothes that he had worn the night before and was unshaven, that all three men were similarly unkempt.

"I'll see you in a bit, Dane," Daniel said, reaching out to touch the now-dry blond hair. Lily could see the spark pass, but her father didn't flinch. The concern over Daniel's having manifested returned with a rush, erasing whatever curiosity she had about why nobody else had gotten any sleep.

"Dane?" She asked instead, choosing to put that fear out of her mind for now. He was safe in her arms and he was hungry. They would worry about everything else later. "You're that unhappy with him being named after you that you decided to change it while I was sleeping?" 

"It was getting confusing," Daniel protested, looking both exhausted and petulant. "And I refuse to answer to 'Big Dan'. And I refuse on his behalf to answer to 'Little Dan'. You and Alex should have considered this complication."

"We'll talk about this later," Lily sighed as Daniel - Dane? - realized that the fingertip was a decoy and started expressing his hunger again. Loudly. "He doesn't come with a volume control, does he?"

Another round of laughter, this time less ill-at-ease, before Hank followed the three men out, his loudly popping neck lending credence to his pleading a need to see sunshine, and Lily was left alone with Jean and Cecilia. In theory, she already knew how to do this - Doctor Friedenthal had gone over breast-feeding when Lily had expressed a preference for that over formula. (Her mother had been a little too relieved at that announcement, Lily thought.) It was just... she wanted to make sure she got it right. 

She did. "Wow, this is weird," she mused. But despite the strange sensation for her, Daniel seemed happy - ravenous, actually, and Lily worried that she had slept too long and let him get too hungry. Starving her baby right off the bat...

"You really didn't have too much of a choice, chica," Cecilia told her after she asked. "And he's not technically starving. Just hungry."

Lily switched sides, Daniel moving reluctantly and the switch between arms not yet coming smoothly. 

"What happened?" Lily asked, not looking up from Daniel. "My father doesn't normally remember that he's got a cross around his neck."

Cecilia sighed and Lily finally looked up and noticed that Cecilia looked exhausted, far more so than from just having been up all night delivering the baby. The hemorrhage must have been...

"As I said, you hemorrhaged," she said slowly and in the voice that sounded more Dr. Reyes and less Cece. "It was sudden and substantial and if Dana hadn't been around, we might have lost you."

Lily let out a deep breath she didn't realize she had been holding. It was obviously the short version of the story. 

"But instead, you're fine," Jean broke in emphatically. "And further along in your healing than Dana herself is, actually. When she healed you, she sort of had to take care of everything. You'll be a little sore and a lot tired, but physiologically, you're weeks from having just had a baby instead of hours."

Lily shook her head, not wanting to dwell on what nearly had been. Daniel, apparently unable to be touched by anyone but her without a reaction, would have been orphaned until Alex's return...It wasn't going to happen, at least not from this, and that was the important part. "Is Dana all right?"

"She nearly passed out from the strain," Cecilia admitted, putting her hand to her head and suddenly realizing that she was still wearing her medical cap. Taking it off, she shook out her hair. "She's upstairs sleeping it off with Sam and the baby. She'll be fine."

"That's good," Lily said, unsure of what else to say. 'Dane' might be a very good nickname for Daniel considering that Dana had saved the lives of both of his parents. Of course, then Lorna was going to get all suspicious... "So now all I have to worry about is how to let someone else hold Daniel without getting a shock."

Cecilia indicated that she should stop Daniel from feeding any more and she did, watching his mouth move as the reflex was still active. Now that he was a few hours older and looking a little less wrinkled, Daniel was looking more and more like the baby pictures Lily had seen of Alex. A different nose, though, and Lily assumed that it was probably hers, then. 

"A quick meeting of the minds," Jean began with a sarcastic snort, "came up with the preliminary conclusion that Dane - Daniel - is possibly electrokinetic. It stands to reason, I suppose - his father and uncle are energy producers as well... You're unaffected, which sort of makes sense considering that Scott and Alex can't do anything to each other...I don't know how much greater or lesser a more distant family connection works, though. Nathan's still in Alaska and I didn't want to pry into your father's mind. He didn't complain, but it is his first grandchild and I don't think that a couple of volts is going to dissuade him."

Lily snorted. "That would be Dad." 

Looking down, Daniel was almost back to sleep. "Oh, good. Food coma's setting in," she murmured, stifling a yawn. "At least one of us is getting some rest."

"Are there any Danger Room sessions with Havok and Cable?" Cecilia asked as she continued putting away the medical equipment. The room was basically clean - that there had been an intense and apparently complicated labor in here only hours before could not be readily seen. Coupled with the fact that she was relatively pain-free, Lily had only Daniel dozing in her arms to convince her that it all hadn't been a very vivid dream.

"I honestly don't think so," Jean said, narrowing her eyes in concentration. Lily started a bit when the buttons of her pajama top fastened by themselves and Daniel stirred, opening his eyes, and then half-closing them again.

A moment later, the door swished open and Bobby came in. He was obviously freshly showered and had that faint blush that Lily had learned was the 'haven't quite recovered from a Danger Room session' look. "I just came by to check on everyone. I figured everything was okay..." He stopped behind Cecilia and put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed. Cecilia fairly squeaked as Bobby tried to give a gentle massage. 

"Get away from me Drake," Cecilia growled without any real heat as she tried weakly to duck away from his hands. "I am unfit for close human contact."

Bobby held fast, though, and murmured something that made Cecilia blush faintly and Jean snicker, but Lily didn't especially care. She could watch her son sleep for hours. Actually, she hoped he did sleep for hours because she was starting to remember how tired she was.

"I think they're done setting up your room," Jean said and Lily reluctantly looked up. "They had to insulate the crib. It's got metal wheels."

Lily nodded. When she was less exhausted, she was going to have to make up a list of the changes she'd have to make at home so that Daniel would be comfortable and nobody else would be affected. "We should figure out how many volts he's carrying," she said, trying not to think on the absurdity of the similarities between her son and a battery.

"So can I get a peek at the newest member of the clan?" Bobby asked, finally letting go of Cecilia so she could go back to printing out records. 

Lily shifted the drowsing baby so that his face wasn't pressed up against her chest. Daniel was almost asleep and didn't seem to care.

"It's a little Alex," Bobby exclaimed in a whisper as he leaned over and tilted his head to get a good angle. "Heya, Sparky!"

"Don't call him that," Cecilia hissed, hitting him in the arm. 

"Ow! I didn't mean it in a bad way," he protested. He looked dramatically persecuted for a moment and then concerned. "The little tyke is almost a nephew to me. You're not mad at me, Lily, are you?"

"Only if you do it again," Lily said, trying to frown and not quite managing it. It was hard to get mad at him and even harder to stay mad. Also, she knew he missed Alex very much and occasionally inappropriate humor was how Bobby expressed most of his more sincere emotions. "I don't want that catching on. It looks like I'm getting stuck with 'Dane' and that's bad enough."

"Deal," Bobby agreed with a nod. "All right. I'll have plenty of time to see everyone later. I'm going to get out of here before I get into any more trouble." With that, he nodded to Lily and Jean and walked towards the door. He stopped to put his arm around Cecilia from behind and kiss the side of her neck, causing her to make a noise of surprise and then try to elbow him in the ribs. She missed because he was already well past.

Lily's smile turned wistful as it did whenever she saw friends being affectionate with their significant others. But at least she had concrete proof of Alex's love, nestled in the crook of her arm. She just wished desperately that Alex were there to see them. And with that, the tears came back. Whatever Dana had done to heal her hadn't done a thing for her pregnancy hormones. 

"You can get up and go shower and change if you want," Cecilia said as she put down her pen. "Or else you can just go back to sleep... Basically, you're free to do what you'd like. El bébé is going to stay down here today and maybe tonight, just so we can make sure his immune system gets cranking up to speed. It'll give everyone a little time to set up your room so that there are no electrical incidents."

"Can I stay with him?" Lily asked, not wanting Daniel to be alone in the med lab. 

"If you'd like," Cecilia said, shrugging. "But he's going to be sleeping most of the day and we're monitoring him, so don't worry about him being left unattended. He won't be."

"I'm keeping an eye on him," Jean told her, tapping her temple to indicate telepathy. 

In the end, Lily just went across the hall to the locker room attached to the Danger Room and showered before returning to the room and going back to sleep. She was awakened a few hours later by Daniel crying. Jean came down and Lily had an audience for her first diaper change as a mother, after which Rogue appeared and said that she was the baby's bodyguard and Lily was being ordered upstairs into the sunlight for a few hours. 

* * *

"Lily?"

She looked up from her book (one of the countless tomes on motherhood and post-partum life that were around the mansion) and saw her father. "Hey."

"You feeling better?" he asked as he entered and sat down on the edge of the bed.

After a night in the med lab, both Lily and Daniel had been moved upstairs to what had once been Alex's room. The night had been long - as exhausted as Lily had been, she hadn't been able to sleep and, in hindsight, had been completely unprepared for what the hours of stillness would do to her. The post-partum blues had hit hard - the strain of the past few months coupled with thoughts of how little Daniel would have so many special needs and limitations until he was old enough to learn how to control his mutation and it all came wrapped up in a desperate, suffocating, palpable agony of missing Alex. 

Jean had come down in the middle of the night - apparently Lily's anguish had set the four child psis into fits. And when Jean, and later Scott and Daniel, had been unable to staunch the flow of tears, Jean had simply sat there and created a psionic shield so that Lily could cry herself to sleep. 

"I'm no longer acting like Linda Blair in 'The Exorcist'," she replied dryly and Daniel smiled uneasily, as if he were apologetic for finding the remark either funny or apt.

She had woken up this morning in the med lab bed, alone except for a fussing Daniel whom she was able to feed without panic or incident. Hank had come around early, bearing breakfast for both he and Lily. They had eaten quietly, Hank saying little except to inform Lily that she had unofficially lost the war to have Daniel called anything but Dane. And then Hank had given both mother and child a check-up and announced that they were free to leave. Lily had been up in her room with the baby ever since. Curiously, although Lily privately thought that nothing around here happened curiously, there had been no visitors.

"It's been a lot, honey," Daniel said with a shrug. "And that's not an excuse. But the point of fact is that you've basically dealt with everything that's happened from the moment you found out Alex disappeared until now by pushing it off to the side. Deferment only works for so long. Trust me, I know this from experience."

Lily looked up at him sharply. She had always liked to think that she was close to her father, as close as could be managed considering that he had spent most of her life on a boat. But there were moments when she realized that there was more to the story than she would like to assume. Part of her knew that she was close to her father mostly because she spent so much time running from her mother. And then it dawned on her that maybe she wasn't the only one who had been running. A few years ago, after she had gotten engaged, her father had sat her down for a long talk about how marriage was an endless effort, that love was necessary, but not sufficient. And he hadn't had to say that that was what had ended his own marriage. 

"You've been plowing through life for the last six months," he went on, looking down at his hands and up at her at varying intervals. "As if there was some work quota you could fulfill and Alex would come back to you. Or you'd magically stop hurting..."

"I believe they call that the 'bargaining' stage of grief, Dad," Lily commented evenly. 

"You've got the baby now," Daniel said. "And he's going to take so much of your time and almost all of your energy and I want you to promise me that you're going to take time for yourself. To heal."

"How do I heal from this?" Lily asked bitterly, putting the book down with a thump. "How do I fix the hole in my heart? He's not dead, he's not alive, he's not anywhere anyone can find him. How do I move on when I know he could come back to me - to us - at any moment? What if I move on and he can't find me?"

Daniel rubbed his hands over his face and sighed. "Don't you think that Alex, wherever he is, is wondering the same thing? Don't you think that he's wondering what happens if he ever gets back here and he's so different that you don't know him anymore? That you won't love him anymore?"

Lily just stared, both at the words and at the vehemence with which they were spoken. They had the air of being well-worn, of having been tossed around in someone's thoughts for decades. And they probably had been. Her father had enlisted on his eighteenth birthday and had seen action at the tail end of Vietnam as his welcome to military life before taking a break for college and a commission. For all of the everyday reminders that her father was a career military man, Lily still, in her mind's eye, just thought of the Navy as a job. She had never been forced to recognize that her father had had to reconcile the same sorts of conflicts that Alex and the rest of the superheroes had to, that being a soldier - for the X-Men or for the US Government - changed you in soul-deep ways.

"Whenever he comes home, Lily, both of you are going to be different people," Daniel cautioned once she looked at him again. "If he had come home a day after he disappeared, you two would still be different people. This _changes_ you. And it's up to you to decide how you change, not if you change. Because it's not an 'if.' It's about how well you adapt once you're together again. 

"I saw this when I got home from Vietnam. I was a kid and I didn't understand any of it back then, but I do now. Or at least I'd like to think that I do. I saw the wives of the POWs, I watched them try to cope. Some of them just froze time - they wouldn't even get new clothes. And some of them just assumed the worst and made like they were widows... Nothing can stop the pain, Lily. There's no mutant power that can make your heart stop hurting like Jean made your labor pains stop."

"So what should I do?" It came out as a whisper. 

"Learn to live," Daniel replied with a shrug, accepting that they were simple words just as he was accepting them as simple truth. "Decide who you want to be and work towards it. Alex thinks you are a special person. He trusts you enough to raise his children. So all you have to do is be true to yourself and you don't have to worry about what Alex is going to think because he's going to approve."

"That's it?" Lily asked with a humorless chuckle. It was such a fantastic thought. Like Peter Pan - 'I think I can fly'. 

"As far as I can reckon it, yeah," Daniel replied with a self-effacing shrug. "Of course, knowing and doing aren't one and the same."

There was silence then and, as if waiting for the opportunity, baby Daniel started to work his way up from a whimper to a cry. 

"Great," Lily said to the baby with no real rancor as she stood up. He had been changed recently and shouldn't be hungry, so she suspected he was just bored. And then she wondered if you could be bored at not-quite two days old. "You have to put your two cents in just like your namesake."

He was looking fairly alert, so she picked him up and brought him back to the bed. He went straight for her breast and she frowned. "Is this a reflex or have you inherited your father's endless appetite?"

Obviously Daniel - Dane - didn't answer her. But she knew that he was going to be constantly looking to feed for the next while. Her milk hadn't come in yet, but she had already been supplied with all sorts of implements for when it did. They looked like a cross between torture devices and sex toys.  
    
"Do you want me to..."

"Dad," Lily sighed as she reached for the towel and awkwardly draped it over her left shoulder. "We are going to have very short conversations for the next few months if you start fleeing every time the baby's hungry. I'll get the under-the-towel routine down sooner than later."

This time, however, Daniel helped her arrange the towel so that she could still see what she was doing and baby Dane ('might as well,' Lily sighed to herself) nursed quietly. He didn't seem interested in switching sides, so Lily was able to awkwardly button up with her free hand. Being left-handed and holding the baby on her left side - she wanted to bear Dane on her stronger arm - had its complications. "How bad is the shock if you hold him?" she asked as she struggled with the top button.

"Hold him? I don't know," Daniel admitted. "Touching him in your arms is only a little shock, like static electricity. It was stronger when he was down in his crib, so I assume it would be like that...Of course, there's a lot less electricity being sent around up here than down in the medical area... Should I try?"

He held out his arms and, after pondering on how fast Dana could get here if she accidentally electrocuted her father, Lily handed over Dane. 

"Well, I definitely feel it," Daniel said with a wry smile that melted into a genuine one as he looked down at his grandson. "But it's not like standing on the deck of a destroyer - it's just a little hum. I can take it."

Lily frowned, getting off of the bed to see what the undersides were made of. It was a wooden bed frame and she could see no metal screws at the bottoms of the legs. Of course, her father had one foot on the floor. "I don't want to fry your nerves, though," she said as she got back up on the bed and indicated that he lift his leg. "He's probably pushing a few milliamps."

He did with a wry smile. "Hell, I've been electrocuted enough times in thirty years at sea."

"I'm going to have to attach the little voltmeter we have in the toolbox to his onesie once we get home," Lily said with a shake of her head. Attaching a voltmeter to her son. "See how much he carries at particular points during the day. I can't imagine him bearing enough volts to short things out on his own; although I suppose that there will be problems with items that are already plugged in and on. I'll start checking up on the going rates of the surge protectors we use at the labs at school. They can't be too bad if we let the undergrads play with them. Either way, it's not going to be much of an issue for a while."

"You're taking him back to the apartment?" Daniel asked, surprised.

Lily looked at him strangely. "Why wouldn't I? It's our home. I have finals to finish grading and a cat to feed and a life to live. Getting the baby's room adjusted for his mutation won't be that hard. And it's not like he's going to be wandering around on his own for a few months. Why?"

"I thought you were going to hang around here for a while," Daniel replied a little uneasily. "Until something gets figured out..."

"Nothing is going to get figured out until Dane is old enough to learn how to control his absorption and releasing of electrical energy. That's going to be years - just like how the psionic kids don't learn off the bat how to deal with their mutations. I'm not going to live here until then."

"And what if there's more to his mutation than just being a battery?"

"Well, then we'll deal with whatever comes," Lily replied crossly. She was starting to get the idea that certain people had spent a lot of time talking to her father about certain ideas and she really, really didn't like that. "I'm on leave next semester. It's May now and I'm going to have until the end of January with nothing but my own research to think about and my son to take care of. And I can certainly combine the two if I have to. My baby is not going to become a prisoner of his mutation."

"But..."

"Dad, stop. Just stop," Lily growled, holding out her hands to take Dane back and gesturing to her father that it was because his own hair was starting to stand on end and not out of pique. "I don't care what everyone told you. I am not moving up here and I am not going to start separating Dane out from the rest of the world. He's a normal baby in every respect but one. And you know what? You said I could be true to Alex by being true to myself? Well Alex would _hate_ the idea of me keeping him here allegedly for his own good. Absolutely hate it."

Daniel put up his hands in surrender as Lily put Dane back in his crib.

The silence was still tense as there was a knock on the open door. "Bad time?" Kurt asked as he peered in.

"Not at all," Lily replied easily, then making a face as she saw what was in Kurt's hand. "But that better be for the baby and not me," she warned, gesturing with her finger at the camera Kurt was holding. 

"Indeed it is," Kurt agreed, nodding sagely as he stepped inside the room. "I have been bidden by Ororo to take a picture of young Dane to send down to the New Lands. Although you are looking, as always, quite fetching and I do not think a photograph of you would be a bad thing." 

"Well, you're in luck," Lily told him, leaning over to look in the crib. Dane's eyes were half-lidded. "He's still vaguely conscious."

Kurt went over to the crib. "I won't startle him, will I?"

"It's too bright in here to need a flash," she replied, looking around. "And he can't see more than a foot right now, so other than that, no."

"Guten abend, Dane," Kurt sang as he looked through the camera's picture viewer. "Can you say 'Guten abend'? We shall endeavor to teach you a civilized tongue once you are a little older. Piotr can have his coterie of Russian psi's. We shall form our own Bavarian clique, yes? Your father speaks excellent German and has good taste in beer, so I think it is a natural fit. I shall take your silence as tacit approbation and flaunt it in front of my esteemed former colleague."

Lily snorted her laughter and watched as Kurt took a few pictures. "You do know that you are taking pictures of him next to the toy that Piotr got him, don't you?" 

Kurt looked at the penguin - Lily was wearing the crucifix - and made a sour face. "Ah. Well, I shall have to raise the stakes a little."

"Oh, Kurt, I wasn't implying that there was an auction going on," Lily protested. "Dane's going to love you no matter what."

"This I know," Kurt agreed, nodding sagely. "I am kind and generous and will teach him good style tips such as how best to accessorize the hard-to-coordinate dinner bib and how important it is to tip the bottle server well. That, and I am a rather intriguing shade of indigo and small children do seem to go for colors."

Daniel laughed outright at the mournful tone Kurt finished on and Kurt turned and smiled at him. In all of the fuss surrounding the birth, Lily had forgotten that this was her father's crash-course in the X-Men. While he had dealt with them in the course of his career in the Navy and they were all higher-profile with the Cairo Accords to be signed next month giving rise to the XSE, he was now meeting them all strictly as people - people who were concerned about his daughter and grandson.

A slight commotion from outside in the hallway interrupted her thoughts and she could make out the shouts of Nicholas and Zara as they tore through the house. 

"And this is what I have to look forward to," she said as the loud screeching, now in the distance - probably downstairs, was suddenly cut off. 

Kurt and her father just smiled.

* * *

"Oops. I thought I put a surge protector there. Ah, well. We just won't tell the nice guy at the Apple store that you're electrokinetic, okay? I'm sure their products just spontaneously blow like that all the time. Although we're really going to have to work on your poker face. You're as bad as your father - even when you're innocent you look guilty... Although at the moment I am getting the distinct impression that that particular beatific grin means something else entirely. Like, say, a new diaper."

*

"All right. Now unless you've added teleportation or telekinesis to your repertoire, there's really no good reason that you should be over here instead of over there. Did you figure out how to roll over when I wasn't looking? Do you want to do it again so that I can pretend that I saw it the first time and I can call everyone up and gush at how brilliant you are?"

*

"I have to tell you kiddo, you're awfully easily amused. Although maybe you're on to something with this toe-sucking thing. Me? I'm still just getting used to seeing my toes again... Just don't spoil your appetite, okay?"


	15. November-December 2007

By unspoken agreement, perhaps some sort of geologist's intuition (Lily felt more different being an engineer in a posse of geologists than being the spouse of a group member and not one of the original cohort), they moved to a large rock formation a yard or so in from the walkway. Central Park was good for that. In warmer weather, there would have been children climbing all over the surface, but November had brought its chill and the youngsters who were not currently in school were too bundled up to be up for much in the way of exploration.

"I have to admit," Sanjay began with an obviously false curmudgeonliness as he leaned down to get a better look, "that young Dane was disturbingly cute in his Halloween costume. The Tigger outfit worked well with the rosy cheeks."

Lily smiled. Behind Sanjay, his boyfriend Adrian was rolling his eyes dramatically as if to indicate that Sanjay's initial reaction to the photos had been much less phlegmatic. 

With Ji-Won back in the northern hemisphere for her sister's wedding this coming weekend and Sanjay returning to Princeton to deliver a talk, Valeri had flown in from Utah to make up an impromptu reunion of most of Alex's old Geology cohort. It was a time for catching up, really; a chance for Ji-Won to show off Kyung, for everyone to meet Dane in person and to see Lily for the first time since Alex disappeared, and for Sanjay to give up the pretense that he had no romantic life. Lily had been a little hesitant to join the group initially, but she was glad she had pulled herself away from her work to come to lunch and the extended socializing afterwards. It hadn't been nearly as hard as she thought it might be, although in the almost-year that had passed, many more things were falling into that category. Getting used to Alex's absence was both nauseating and comforting. 

But any fears about lunch being awkward proved unfounded as they had mostly discussed academic stuff - Sanjay's attempts to get some sort of ichthyosaurus re-classified (Adrian providing a dramatic re-enactment of Sanjay at his most incensed that had had the waiter coming by to make sure nobody was choking), Valeri's adjustment to life in Utah ("I have traveled thousands of miles to escape one sort of totalitarianism only to plunge myself back into another one," he had sighed mournfully), Ji-Won and Kyung's fantastic tales of life in the New Lands (including the diamond mine that had been discovered accidentally outside Biosphere Seven when Facilities had gone to install a new humidifier), and Lily's recounting of the set-to with the Greek contingent that had recently been renewed by being moved into a more mainstream mechanical engineering journal.

As if sensing that he was the topic of conversation, Dane started making happy noise and indicating that he wanted out of his stroller. Lily unbuckled him and offered him to Sanjay, who at first looked like he was being offered a painful death, but took the baby and smiled in spite of himself as Dane nestled happily and Adrian looked on smugly.

"And this is all possible because of his outfit?" Valeri asked, reaching out tentatively and touching Dane's arm. Dane was dressed in his special clothes underneath his jacket and mittens and hat and, through them, even contact with his skin would not cause pain. The mittens and hat were to preserve body heat, but the jacket was half-open so that he wouldn't overheat.

"Yeah," Lily confirmed. The clothes were a miracle of alien technology combined with human ingenuity, although the Shi'ar aspect of it was not discussed. "Reed Richards worked with the idea for the fabric and it was made for Dane up in Westchester."

The fabric, such as it was, was a complex weave of super-thin fiber-optic cable, coated microns-wide copper wire, and cotton threads. And other stuff, which even Reed didn't quite understand. It wasn't as soft as cotton could be - it was more like cotton sheets than t-shirt material - but it was still pleasant to the touch and Lily had no worries about it irritating Dane's skin. Or getting damaged when he put it into his mouth. Dane was too far into the 'everything is edible' phase for Lily to be too worried about her son.

"Well, the whole idea that it glows is just boggling," Valeri mused, watching Dane's t-shirt change colors. It did so constantly and to a striking effect - the fiber-optic cable had been combined with something Reed had been annoyingly oblique about (although Lily knew that he often couldn't help himself) to produce an effect not unlike a cross between a mood ring and a neon sign. If Dane was at a relatively low charge, the material was in the purple-blue range and it worked its way up to the reds and oranges if he was carrying more volts. It was occasionally hard to coordinate outfits, but the tradeoff was worth it. For the first time in his life, Dane could be touched by someone other than his mother, his blood relatives, or a very narrow range of mutants.

"It's not that hard to understand how it does so," Valeri went on, sitting back even as he still watched the shirt shimmer between shades of indigo and green. "Different voltages activating different colors and all. But to be done on such a microscopic level..."

There was a general murmur of agreement. It was one thing to see such effects at the science fair in a giant demonstration. It was another to see it in a shirt small enough for the average infant.

"Now all that needs to happen is for it to be mass-produced," Ji-Won said, looking pointedly at Kyung before elbowing him gently in the ribs. "Dane's not the only baby - or even the only person - who could make use of it." 

"We're working on it, we're working on it," Kyung cried out with a laugh. Indeed, Lily knew that the New Lands' Commerce Ministry was offering a bounty to any textile manufacturer who could produce the material. It was an offer typical of the general innovating initiative that was an essential part of the developing New Lands culture - the latest in everything high-tech, especially anything that could help mutants.

While there were plenty of Dane-specific items that had come from the New Lands, his outfits came courtesy of the Shi'ar fabricator in Westchester, one of the many invaluable gifts that had come from there. But despite the seemingly never-ending supply of gadgets, gifts, and new ideas that came from the X-types (now mostly from the XSE, although Lily had also been the beneficiary of Hank McCoy's friendship with Reed Richards), all had not been happy either in the Summers family or in the extended X-clan since Dane's birth. 

The pressure for Lily to move to Westchester had grown intense, especially as the projected costs for Dane-proofing the apartment had mounted. With no precautions, Dane could rather easily push five milliamperes of current - enough to hurt people as well as damage property. 

 But Lily had been adamant about staying independent - she didn't want Dane to grow up in the fortress-like existence in which the twins and Clare and now Harry and Nate were forced to live. Unable to move through the world because of their unprotected minds, they could have no other friends their ages. And, more terrifying to Lily, their social skills were developing wildly unevenly as the result of knowing only adult companionship and the admittedly weird confraternity of other psis. Lily didn't want Dane to either develop along similar lines or suffer the consequences of being headblind among children who did not understand the concept apart from the fact that it made him different from them. Logan had had to explain to Nicholas that Dane wasn't damaged because he couldn't reach out mentally the way little Nate could and that episode had only hardened Lily's resolve.

"Well, it must be cool to be so trendy so young," Ji-Won decided with an approving nod and Lily laughed with the others, happy that her wandering mind hadn't been detected. Especially among people who hadn't seen her in a while, any woolgathering on her part tended to be assumed to have to do with Alex when, point of fact, it rarely did anymore. At least in public.

"My son the fashion plate," she agreed, reaching out to wipe at the corner of Dane's mouth. As was his habit of late, Dane pulled his head away and batted ineffectually at her hand. "Ah, the downsides of emotional development."

In the end, it had been Scott who had effectively stopped the simmering through his quiet defection to Lily's side. He had never discussed his reasons with her, but Lily suspected that it had something to do with his own childhood and his reluctance to let any other child grow up feeling either dangerous or like an outcast. Whatever the motivations, things had settled down in the past month and there had been no lingering coolness when Lily had taken Dane up to Westchester for the twins' fifth birthday party the previous week.

"So has this haute couture made it easier to know when Dane's..." Valeri trailed off, gesturing with his hand to indicate what he meant.

"Too high voltage?" Lily asked and Valeri nodded, a little embarrassed. After six months, Lily had gotten used to people hesitating to use any terms that might make it sound like Dane was an appliance. But Lily had gotten over such qualms - voltage was as much a part of her life as Dane's weight and height and intermittent interest in learning to crawl. "Oh, no. Dane makes it perfectly clear when he's got too much juice. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize it wasn't colic."

In fact, Lily's understanding of Dane's energy needs was growing every day. He required some - if he got drained too far, he was lethargic (hence the automatic correlation between Bishop and naps; thankfully Dane had not yet gotten suspicious of the man). If he was carrying too much, he got fussy. Within his normal range (according to the voltmeter that had been attached to his diaper for much of his life), Dane was generally very happy. So happy that Lily occasionally got concerned. 

"I worry sometimes that I'm doping him," she admitted with a wry smile as she pulled out a bottle and offered it to Sanjay, who took it and looked perplexed for a moment before Dane reached out for it. She'd started the transition to the bottle in earnest last month; she wanted Dane to be done with nursing by the time classes began in January. Thankfully, Dane was being accommodating, especially when people other than her offered bottles. "He likes being around electrical fields. A lot. And I wonder if I'm not keeping him on some sort of permanent high by living in Manhattan instead of going off to Alaska or someplace less urban."

There was a ripple of amusement through the group, although it was laced with a bit of curiosity and concern. The general reaction to Dane, both in and out of the mutant community, was one of awe - electrokinetics were not common and certainly not as a mutation that was infant-onset. The restrictions were novel to everyone, as were Lily's attempts to find ways to break them down. Personally, she didn't find anything extraordinary about it - she was doing exactly what every other parent of a child with special needs would do. 

"Do you know if Alex was affected that way?" Ji-Won asked thoughtfully. "I mean, I know all energy producers aren't the same, but if there are similarities between Alex and his brother, then perhaps it's safe to extend the properties to Dane."

"I don't know," Lily admitted. "Alex was always happy outdoors, but who's to say whether that was because he absorbs cosmic radiation, which is more readily available outdoors, or simply because he grew up outside of cities and likes the outdoors? Scott's the same way, but in general he's really hard to use as an example. He was injured as a child and so nobody's really sure whether the differences between him and Alex in terms of their powers are a consequence of that or not. I haven't taken Dane far enough outside of the city for us to even know if he absorbs any sort of radiation - there's enough garden-variety electricity for him to be juicing up on that alone."

"Don't you have a place in Alaska you can go to?" Valeri asked, kicking some dry leaves with his foot until the grass was visible underneath. "Dane's old enough to fly. But it's a long trip..."

"And there's that whole 'please turn off all electronic devices' announcement they make," Ji-Won added with a derisive snort. "That's going to make vacations interesting. And here I was hoping to convince you to bring him down to Aliyah next summer."

"Well," Lily demurred, "there are always other ways for us to travel. Being Havok's son has gotten Dane a lot so far. A lot. I don't think I'd be able to do much of anything were I on my own. And the alternatives are unthinkable."

It was a horrifying and humbling thought, one that had gone through Lily's mind constantly in the months of tenseness between her and Westchester and one that still made her shudder: it was a fact of post-Merge life - with exceedingly rare exception, almost all children with alpha-level infant-onset mutations were institutionalized. Even were it possible to care for such a child at home, the costs of doing so were usually prohibitive. And while Lily had no concerns financially in terms of everyday matters - even on leave, Lily drew salary and (courtesy of some creative paper-pushing by Lorna) she still received Alex's paychecks for his being a part of X-Factor at the time of his disappearance - there was no way she'd have been able to afford even a fraction of the more advanced tools and toys she used to make it possible for Dane to live a nominally 'normal' life.  

"Paul and Stephanie thank heaven daily that Jeffrey hasn't manifested," Ji-Won agreed, her resentment at the direness of the situation evident in the set of her crossed arms. "But at least you've got the DCM now," she added with the pride of someone from the New Lands. 

The Directed Conductive Matrix (DCM), roughly speaking, was a mesh of incredibly thin metal filaments coated in a mysterious material (patented and kept more secret than the Coca-Cola formula, although Lily privately suspected that it was really rather basic 38th-Century technology) that allowed for one-way conductivity. From any point on the matrix, the DCM absorbed certain kinds of energy, converted it to electricity, and sent it along the metal filament to battery-like energy sinks. The stuff came in giant sheets that looked like a cross between chicken wire and plastic kitchen wrap and was applied to walls and floors as if it were insulation and with nothing more high-tech than a blow dryer. While almost every new home in the New Lands was now built with it already installed, it had only recently been readily available - at a rather high cost - outside of Antarctica. 

"I saw a demonstration of that last semester at St. Andrew's," Adrian murmured with a disbelieving shake of his head. A physical chemist, he and Sanjay had met at a symposium the previous year, although Sanjay had waited for months to tell anyone. When it had finally become unavoidable - Adrian had answered the phone one morning, apparently - Ji-Won had pronounced it the least surprising outing since Elton John. "Astonishing stuff. The presenter was going on and on about how they had barely gotten started on improvements and how they were still experimenting with the diameter of the filament and there were a few metal alloys they'd like to try and all I could think of was how they were missing the point. The whole idea in and of itself is just brilliant. In primary school we used to grow sugar crystals on wire running through solution. And now we're here."

"We are here," Valeri agreed. "Sitting on a rock in Central Park. Amidst trees and grass and flowers that I have almost forgotten that I knew existed. Salt flats do not do much for me if I cannot dig through them."

"You're drawing yourself a nice big salary," Sanjay retorted. "Buy yourself a shovel."

* * *

"Reed? It's Lily Summers. Judging by the beeps you've got a ton of messages, so I'll keep this brief. Dane's starting to short out the light-producing clothing. I don't know why yet - I don't have anything in the house that will let me see where the problems are. It's not a simple tear - they work for about ten minutes and then blow. I'll take them up to school on Thursday when I go in if I don't hear from you by then, but if you have a moment I'd really appreciate a call-back. Best to you, Susan, and Franklin."

*

"I know Mommy offered you carrots for dinner, but she's not very good with the labeling and one baggie of orange frozen puree cubes looks a lot like another. How about butternut squash? And I'm pretty sure the green cubes are kale and spinach, which I know you'll love because it does spectacular things to your diapers."

*

"Don't cry, Dane. It's not your fault. I told Felix that he was going to get in trouble if he bothered you when you weren't grounded. The cat will be fine. Heck, the shock may have been good for him - that's the fastest I've ever seen him run and I've known him longer than I've known you. It's all right, sweetie, don't cry. You scared him more than he scared you. Really."

* * *

"Lily!"

The call came from the other end of the studio and Lily looked up. Bobby was wearing a pained expression. And a Santa hat.

"Let me guess," she said, wiping off her hands on her jeans and standing up. "Diaper check?"

They had gathered in Piotr's studio - Rogue and Bobby had come down from Westchester and Orly from Rockland - to help Lily with the creation of a playpen for Dane that Lily could set up in her office at school. The idea was both simple and complex; to keep Dane amused while keeping him contained.  The plans had been designed by Lily and Orly with help from Piotr and the Fisher-Price website and involved what Lily hoped was a happy medium between Piotr's aesthetics and her mechanics.

Bobby's face went from pained to wry. "I can pretty much verify that the check will come back positive."

Lily sighed dramatically and shook her head. "You are such a wuss," she told Bobby as she picked the grinning Dane up from the cushion prison they had built for him. "And you, Sunshine, are not helping."

Actually, Dane was helping. Tremendously. Today was the one-year anniversary of Alex's disappearance and Lily had sharply refused all notions of a gathering - to commemorate what, she had asked. Instead, she could let the fact that Dane was going to celebrate his first Christmas take over her thoughts. That, and the challenge that was going to be her first semester back at school since Dane had been born. Professionally, the leave had been productive - well within the expectations she had set up when she had first decided to take the semester off. Two articles written and submitted for review was not a bad haul considering the complex life that had come into her own in May.

Key to the return to work was what to do with Dane. A babysitter was next to impossible - how could Lily leave Dane in the care of someone who couldn't take care of his needs without harm coming to them? The solution had presented itself - at a cost. The Mechanical Engineering department needed a new undergraduate 'mentor' and wanted someone to balance out the group - they already had one of the robotics people and the younger of the biomechanical specialists. It would mean an additional five hours a week of open hours (although Lily had been assured that it would be mostly free time) - almost two classes' worth of time on top of the two she was already teaching. But in return, Dane would be allowed to stay in the office with her and she'd get to switch offices to something larger than the breadbox she had been stuck in the past four-and-a-half years. What to do with Dane during class hours had yet to be determined, but in order for him to be there at all, Lily needed some place to put him. Hence today.

The playpen was not that far from normal - PVC pipe skeleton and synthetic mesh skin - but it had to be built from scratch rather than co-opting an existing model. There could be no exposed metal parts and there was insulated wire running through the padded PVC to connect the various appliances and toys. In addition to the sorts of low-level, brightly colored interactive toys that were good for toddlers (according to Fisher-Price), there were a couple of Dane-specific items to use up some of the energy he produced. 

Pride of place went to a small colored-light board that Orly had found at a garage sale. It had removable plastic bulbs that were too big for Dane to swallow but were easy enough for his burgeoning motor skills to control. Rogue had contributed a string of Christmas lights in the shapes of farm animals, although they hadn't yet decided which two sides that would run along. There was also the requisite voltmeter and step-down controller, the custom-designed battery-cum-capacitor to draw off and store the electricity, the current adapter, and a ground-fault interrupter that had also been tweaked. And Bobby had somehow come up with two Westchester County "Danger: High Voltage" signs.

By the time Lily returned with a sweeter-smelling infant, Bobby and Rogue had run the last of the cord through the pipe. The bottom part of the frame was already assembled and Orly was testing all of the connections, muttering about how she was spending her weekends doing exactly what she did at work. Piotr appeared out of a closet with the plastic-wrapped padded cushion that was going to make up the bottom. It had come from the New Lands and was basically a giant square bolster with copper and nickel ribbon woven through it. 

"It's pink," Bobby said with some surprise as Lily placed Dane back in the makeshift safe area. "I would have thought you'd have ordered it in another color."

"If it came in another color," Piotr replied with a shrug as he tore off the plastic. "Perhaps we might have done so."

Bobby made a face and then turned to shrug at Dane, who was observing him closely. Lily noticed that a lot with Dane - he was a big people-watcher. 

"It's good to go," Orly pronounced as she stood up. "We can drop the top on now."

Rogue showed off a little by taking to the air and holding the frame slightly aloft so that it could be easily aligned with the base and the joints fastened in place simultaneously by the others. She then hoisted the entire playpen up - taking advantage of the fact that Piotr's loft had nice high ceilings so that all of the electrical connections could be made and checked once more.

The phone rang just as Piotr dropped the pad into the playpen. He went to the table by his desk to answer it while the others tried to figure out which was the best way to plug the cushion into the frame. 

"I have to go down to Grinnell's gallery for a moment," Piotr announced when he returned. 

"Is there a problem?" Rogue asked, looking and sounding concerned. 

The general reaction to the return of Peter Nicholas had been positive, although there had been a couple of instances of paintings being sold because the owners hadn't wanted anything created by a mutant terrorist/hero. Within the art world, however, Piotr had been welcomed back to a degree that made him uncomfortable - he was not, Lily knew, a man for the spotlight and was greatly embarrassed by requests to talk at exhibitions and art schools. Nevertheless, Piotr was now working long hours to produce enough new pieces for the show opening next month that would commemorate the one-year anniversary of his 'return'.

"The opposite, actually," he replied, an odd smile playing on his face. "I should be back very shortly. There is beer in the refrigerator if you all finish before I return."

"All right," Bobby agreed slowly, obviously not quite convinced that Piotr was on a harmless errand. "We'll see you in a few."

Once Piotr left, the four speculated on the reason for the sudden departure. What could be going on at the gallery on a Sunday evening? Bobby wondered if it wasn't an incidence of anti-mutant destruction - say a damaged painting or a nasty poster. Rogue scoffed at that idea, saying that Piotr would have said something if it was anything like that. Orly wondered if someone hadn't come in demanding to meet the artist in order to commission a piece. Lily wasn't sure what it was, but didn't think it was any of the above. 

When the playpen was minimally ready - it was still missing toys and pillows and other amenities - Dane was dropped in for a test sit. At first he wasn't terribly happy at being cut off from the rest of the world - he couldn't see everyone and everything. Lily had been worried about this. Ever since the failure of the energy-absorbing cloth, Dane had been basically reduced to four of his senses, lacking touch. To limit another one had to send off some sort of primal alert. His wail of distress was cut short, however, when he realized that his mother and everyone else were suddenly visible as they stood over the playpen. Object permanence hadn't really set in yet. 

"Maybe we should investigate a mirror," Orly mused as Lily knelt down and held Dane up so that he was sort-of standing and holding on to the rail. He wasn't strong enough to stand for long, even aided, but it was enough for Bobby to drop to the floor and put his face against the mesh and get Dane's attention. Lily let Dane down so that he, too, had his face against the mesh. Bobby pulled away slightly to avoid any shock, but the two managed to have a cheerfully incoherent little conversation and Dane seemed slightly mollified. 

Lily moved around to where Orly was checking out how the meters and converters worked with Dane actually in the playpen. The plug to the wall ran from the ground-fault interrupter and nothing in the room had flickered or otherwise indicated that there had been a surge or deficit. The small, flat digital readout gave the current power, the high and the low and the average in a neat order.  This was where the tinkering would have to be - how to draw enough energy off of Dane so that he'd be comfortable without leaving him perpetually sluggish. 

Dane wasn't interested in investigating his little prison - and Lily realized that it had indeed gone from playpen to holding cell, at least until Dane accepted that nobody was going anywhere just because he didn't see them - until Rogue started playing with the lights and toys at the other end. That drew his attention somewhat and Rogue moved him over to the other side so that he could reach out for the bright red bulb, pulling it out. The bulb - a clear piece of plastic - went dark and he looked charmingly perplexed by what he had done until Rogue guided his hand back to the board and plugged the bulb into another slot and it turned blue. Dane squealed happily.

After a bit more playing, Lily picked up Dane and pulled out the baby food. While Piotr wasn't back yet, Dane could still eat. Rogue and Orly started a strange conversation about synthetic skin while Lily fed Dane semolina and purees of carrots and broccoli. Making her own baby food had not been anything she'd planned to do, but a box from her mother had contained silicone ice cube trays and instructions and the resulting emails had been the most civil and constructive that they'd exchanged in a long time. Of course, Dane was soon going to be ready for chunkier fare and there was no way her mother was going to have suggestions for how to properly emulsify beef stew, but Lily could be gracious enough to appreciate the help this far.

"Rogue," Bobby finally protested as she and Orly were still talking about synthetic skin tissue, his face wrenched in horrified disgust, "Can we please stop the further exploration of your 'Silence of the Lambs' fantasy? Fake skin isn't going to do you any better or worse than gloves and a body suit. And it's significantly more disturbing."

Rogue blushed and Orly and Lily laughed. Dane, attempting to mimic the laughter, dribbled applesauce. As Lily wiped his mouth, Dane tried to get away and then pointed towards the doorway with a chubby and dirty fist.

Piotr looked, for lack of a better expression, bemusedly distracted. 

"You're safe," Bobby said by way of greeting as he got up off of the floor near Lily and Dane. 

"I am," Piotr agreed, pointing behind him towards the hallway to the rest of the apartment. "And I am quite hungry. I would have thought you all would have raided the refrigerator already."

"Nah, we're all legit now," Rogue replied with a sigh, also standing up. "The X-Men woulda raided the fridge, but, well, I'm an _officer_ now."

Laughter rang out among the group as they headed towards the kitchen. Rogue and Bobby had brought dinner supplies - a healthy stack of steaks and bag of potatoes. They attempted dinner with the same mixed results as the construction of the playpen. Lily mostly watched, holding Dane as he sat on the edge of the marble countertop, and doing nothing more than giving directions for the most efficient placement of steaks on broiler trays.

After dinner, as Piotr put up coffee and tea and gave Orly a plate to put out the pie she had brought, Lily put Dane down to sleep in Piotr's room. Dane wasn't a wiggler in his sleep and Piotr's bed was quite large, but Lily still put a few pillows around him lest anything happen.

"So," Rogue said as dessert was being consumed. "What happened at the gallery that you had to go in?"

Piotr smiled. "Callisto was there."

Everyone else murmured in surprise. 

"What did she want?" Rogue asked, concern evident in her voice. 

"I do not know," Piotr admitted, leaning back in his seat. "I do not know that she knows."

Lily wondered how awkward the conversation must have been - Piotr definitely looked as if a great deal more had happened than he was willing to say. And, today being what it was, she wondered if that is how it would go when she finally saw Alex again.

"I thought she was at the rally today," Bobby mused. "The one that Scott and Jean and Warren were going to."

"The Morlock one?" Orly asked. "About the museum?"

"What Morlock rally?" Lily asked, confused. Unless she made a special point of it, between Dane and the general business of the holidays, she didn't see the news.

"The city wants to finally build the Second Avenue subway line," Bobby explained, rolling his eyes. The MTA had only been threatening that for thirty years. "But the tunnels the MTA had dug for the original plans for the subway are the ones that the Morlocks lived in and that's where the Massacre was."

"And there's a group of Morlocks - I guess you'd call them former Morlocks now," Rogue continued, "Who want to turn the tunnels into a museum to commemorate the Massacre. But the city's sayin' that they own the tunnels and can't afford to dig new ones somewhere else and to say that the whole stretch should be a monument is too much. I suppose they're right about all that, but still, it seems kinda creepy."

"It's not as if nobody has ever built on cemetery or a site of bloodshed before," Orly pointed out, sipping at her tea. "Hell, most of Europe would have to be empty fields if they didn't. Even here, we've built over Civil War sites and Indian massacres and whole sorts of unpleasant things. Doesn't mean anyone's forgotten about them."

"True, but... I don't know," Rogue sighed "I was there, so I don't think I can be objective about it."

"The city is offering to build a memorial above ground somewhere," Bobby admitted, cutting himself another piece of pie. "And, let's face it, how many people are going to go to a museum that's a combination of sewer runoffs and subway tunnels?"

"Hey, I love the Transit Museum," Lily spoke up. "That's all underground."

"The Morlock tunnels are dark and dank and filthy and they stink," Bobby replied, shaking his head at the memory. "They're not exactly the place you can turn into a field trip for third-graders. Don't get me wrong; I think it would be great to have a memorial for the Massacre. But... I think there are ways of doing it to make it a much more effective presentation. Put together an exhibit of artifacts of Morlock life or something, give Marrow some more videotape to interview survivors..."

"Marrow - Sarah - is behind the rally, I think," Rogue said after the silence grew. "She was the one who called the XSE lookin' for people to come talk."

"Oh, so that was what Scott was mumbling about," Lily blurted in surprise. "He was being really vague and confusing when he and Jean came by for dinner last week and he didn't look like he wanted to go into it."

"Scott doesn't like the idea of a museum," Bobby explained. "He thinks something constructive should come out of the situation rather than just it being there as a mute reminder. And he's sort of stuck because he can't come out and say so."

"Why not?" Piotr asked. 

Bobby rolled his eyes expressively. "Because he's the most visible face of the XSE now and most people still know him from the X-Men and there's the fact that at the time of the Massacre itself we were pretending to be mutant hunters. He doesn't want anything he says to be perceived as being anti-mutant and he's not sure how anything he says will get received at all."

"I have to admit to being glad that I am no longer a part of this," Piotr admitted with a wry smile. "Although, from what I gathered, I don't think Callisto was terribly in favor of turning the tunnels into a museum, either. Perhaps for similar reasons to Scott, although I think it is out of something a great deal more personal."

"What do you mean?" Rogue asked curiously, picking at a sliver of apple that was poking out of the pie until Orly handed her the knife and she sheepishly cut herself another piece. 

"It is a very personal place to her," Piotr said with a simple shrug. "Her home, where her greatest victories and greatest defeats took place... It is where she earned the right to lead the Morlocks, where she lost that right, and where the people she was charged to protect perished.  She doesn't want to have people walking through it eating popcorn and cracking jokes." 

"I am willing to bet the house on the fact that Callisto didn't phrase it quite so diplomatically," Bobby commented wryly.

Piotr shrugged again, smiling. Lily knew nothing of Callisto, but felt safe drawing the conclusion that the woman must be in possession of a sharp tongue to go with the apparently prickly personality.

Eventually the conversation moved on to other things and soon it was late enough that it was time to leave. Orly had driven in and volunteered to drop everyone off at home rather than make Rogue and Bobby worry about the Sunday schedule for MetroNorth. Dane was retrieved - he woke up as Lily dressed him, but was back asleep by the time they got to Orly's car.


	16. January-March 2008

"All right. This place has some serious feng-shui issues going on here," Lily announced as she looked around her new office. The furniture was haphazardly strewn around the space, not all of it upright. It was two weeks until classes began and Facilities was still on intersession mode, although Lily wasn't sure that you could measure their work in natural numbers even during the semester.

Behind her, Jean snorted a laugh. "At least it's been freshly painted."

"I guess," Lily admitted with a wry smile. The place still smelled strongly of new paint and the walls gleamed white in the midday sun. "Okay. So where should we put things? And I say 'we' like I'm going to be doing anything but pointing."

"Perk of having a telekinetic in the family," Jean replied sagely. "At least you appreciate it. Scott hates it when I re-arrange the furniture."

"I think that's because you do it so often," Lily chuckled as she walked over to the windows and opened them despite the freezing air outside. "Throws him off."

"He needs it," Jean said decisively. "All right. Where you want the playpen and which desk do you want and where do you want it?"

The office was large because it was supposed to be for two faculty members. But part of the agreement with the department's Executive Officer (why CUNY insisted on using business terms was still a mystery to Lily five years after she had first interviewed for the job) was that she'd be nominally sharing her office with Bob Weinberger, a man who had never made use of his office space in the twenty years that he'd been teaching. Even so, the place was rather luxurious for Steinman - it had an armchair (probably stolen from the student lounge, Lily thought, as it was of the same black pleather and cube shape), a table big enough for four people to sit at, two desks, some file cabinets, a computer on a rolling table, a dorm fridge with a coffeepot sitting on top of it, a two-sided blackboard on wheels, and fairly generous shelving.

"The big one," Lily replied. "I'll let the student Magnus set me up with have the little one to work at if she wants it."

The email had come last week, a few days after the phone call from President Lehnsherr. Magnus had heard from Ororo of Lily's plight to find a baby-sitter for when she was in class and knew of someone who might be of help. She was the niece of an old friend and a sophomore at Barnard (actually a joint student at Barnard and the Jewish Theological Seminary), which was only a couple of subway stops away. She was also a beta-level energy absorber.

"I heard about that," Jean commented as she simultaneously shifted all of the furniture towards the door and away from herself and Lily. "She's a relative of Gabrielle Haller's, right?"

"Yeah," Lily replied. "A great-niece. Shalit Haller. From the way everyone seems to raise their eyebrows, I'm gathering Ambassador Haller had some connection with the X-Men's past?"

Jean snorted. "Yeah, you could say that," she agreed. "She had quite a history with both Charles and Magnus. But a great-niece... That's wonderful. Just in the nick of time, huh?"

"Just," Lily agreed, walking over to the corner of the room and mentally measuring the distance between wall and window and from the floor to the bottom shelf of the four attached to the wall. "Let's put the file cabinet here... I was going to put in a quiet inquiry with Columbia's mutant organization, but this does save the day. She sent me her schedule and even offered to switch sections of a class in order to meet my times."

The file cabinet slid smoothly a hair's breadth above the floor, coming to rest without a noise. The computer table followed, pausing when Lily nodded that she thought it was a good choice.

"So you're all covered?" 

"Except for Thursday afternoons, yeah," Lily confirmed, looking at the space next to the computer table and wondering if she could put the playpen there so that both desk and computer would be visible to Dane. Of course, she wasn't sure she was even going to use the computer or just bring her laptop with her. "It's my grad section, so I'm just going to ask everyone if we can move it."

"You can do that?" Jean asked, surprised. 

"A good percentage of my grad students are already in the work force," Lily explained with a shrug. "Can we try the desk over here? With enough space so that the playpen... Yeah, like that... The ones who are working have to take off early to get here for class. Most of their employers will let them - heck, most of their employers are paying for them to go to school - but it's easier for them if they don't have to be losing time."

Ten minutes later, everything was in place. The second file cabinet was next to the door with the coffeepot and fridge on the other side. The smaller desk was against the wall diagonally opposite the room from where the computer table was and the table and blackboard were on the other side of the space where the playpen would go along the same wall as the computer. The armchair was against the wall by the window in a small empty space, the unpadded chairs were unstacked and put around the table, the padded chair was put by the smaller desk, and the nicer padded chair with wheels was put by Lily's desk. 

"Cool," Lily pronounced, looking around.

"Ha," Jean scoffed. "You haven't seen cool. Watch this." 

Lily watched Jean close her eyes. A couple of moments later, Sulven appeared with the playpen exactly in the space it was supposed to be in. 

"Okay, so that was cooler," Lily admitted with a cackle. "Thanks, Sulven."

"You're welcome," Sulven replied with a nod. She looked around and sniffed, making a face. "I suppose one works where one has to."

"It's public school," Lily snorted. "Nobody can afford the oak furnishings."

"Everything okay back home?" Jean asked and Lily smiled. This afternoon's activities were but a small part of the day's excitement for the extended X-family. With the formalizing of the XSE, it became impossible for everyone to take the Christmas holidays off - Lily was sure that nobody had considered that when it had become a military-style operation. As a consequence, two weeks into the New Year meant a mass changeover as to who was working and who was on vacation. Today was the last day of vacation for those who had missed out on taking the second half of December off and while it all moved cleanly within the XSE, off-duty there was mild chaos. Jean had been very eager to get some time away, although she assured Lily that keeping an eye on Dane would not be a hardship back at XSE headquarters. So when Scott had dropped Jean off this morning, he had picked up Dane (using a borrowed car seat) for safekeeping.

"The Guthries are returned from Kentucky," Sulven reported with a faint flicker of 'I've had enough of this crap.' "But the Wisdoms are snowbound in Chicago and if Bishop attempts to delay his departure for the New Lands until they return, I just might teleport him there myself." She scowled and Lily hoped that Bishop would go quietly without Sulven having to resort to force.

"The man really, really needs a vacation," Jean explained with a shake of her head. "He insisted on working straight through the holidays because he said that everyone else was either mentally or physically on vacation."

"So he's fried," Lily surmised. 

"Like bacon," Jean agreed. 

Sulven impatiently waved the other two women over so she could teleport them back to Westchester. Lily looked around, remembered to close the windows, and then joined Sulven and Jean by the blackboard.

"He did fit in to his busy schedule a few moments to knock your son out," Sulven added with a twinkle of amusement as they suddenly materialized in the drawing room at the mansion. Almost used to teleportation at this point, Lily smiled - Dane was not going to be fond of the man in a few years.  

"Whatever works," she replied. "Was there a problem with any of the kids..." she trailed off, gesturing vaguely at her head. At Christmas, Nate Guthrie had accidentally formed some sort of telepathic link to Dane when the two had been playing near each other. It had been quickly broken, but it would be a problem for a while. 

"The Guthries didn't return until after Daniel was asleep," Sulven assured as they headed towards the hallway. Apart from Ororo, Sulven was the only person who always called Dane by his full name. "Clare is at her home with her parents and mine are with Piotr. I am retrieving them in... four hours."

"They're not staying over?" Lily asked with surprise. The twins loved staying with Piotr and Logan and Sulven would indulge them - particularly if work was busy. 

"Piotr has a date tonight," Sulven explained, checking her watch. 

"It's not a date," Kurt corrected as he appeared from around the corner. Dressed in his XSE uniform, he was sorting through a pile of mail. "It's dinner. Guten abend, Lily. How are you?"

He came over and gave Lily a warm hug that she returned. 

"They have romantic leanings towards each other," Sulven retorted, checking her watch. "It might as well be." She pulled an envelope out of Kurt's hands and walked off, nodding to everyone before she disappeared. 

Kurt looked after her, doing a double-take as he realized that she had in fact taken the envelope he was going to give to her.

"Time out," Lily cried, gesturing with her hands. "Who is Piotr having a dinner date with?"

"Callisto," Jean answered wryly. 

Lily laughed and coughed at the same time. 

"It surprised the heck out of all of us, too," Jean said comfortingly as she pounded Lily on the back. 

"I'm not surprised," Lily said once she had gotten her breath back. "Well, not that surprised."

"Have you been withholding information from us, Frau Doktor Summers?" Kurt asked, looking mortally wounded as he held the pile of envelopes to his breast. "Were you privy to gossip concerning our dear friend Piotr that you did not share? For shame. And here I thought that my staunch patronage of your beautiful son would, perhaps, earn me a morsel of gentle consideration..."

"Oh, stop, Kurt," Lily begged, "Before I start laughing hard enough to choke again."

"Well, _I_ want to know what you know," Jean said, grabbing Lily by the elbow and heading for the kitchen.

"It's not big news," Lily explained as she turned around so that she was walking forwards. "Bobby and Rogue were there, too."

"Unreliable sources, both of them," Kurt sniffed. "You are not excused."

"The evening we got together to put together Dane's playpen," Lily began after she was parked on a stool in the kitchen and faced with two cross-armed superheroes. "Piotr got a call to go down to Grinnell's gallery. He didn't say why, but he came back an hour or so later and he was... a little... preoccupied, maybe. Definitely something had happened. But all he said was that Callisto had been at the gallery."

"And?" Kurt prompted.

"And then we got distracted by debating the merits of turning the Second Avenue tunnels into a Morlock shrine," Lily finished. "Apparently Callisto had been on her way back from a rally at City Hall."

"Oh, I remember that day," Jean exclaimed. "We ran into Callisto at the rally. She was looking pretty upset, actually. I thought she was going to tear mine and Scott's heads off for being there, but she didn't."

"So we have... five weeks, then," Kurt mused aloud, pacing back and forth in a short circuit, slapping the pack of mail into one hand in time with his steps. "Five weeks when he could have said something and didn't. We don't even know if this is their first date. Or are you withholding that information as well?" Kurt asked, pointing the mail at Lily. 

"I know nothing," Lily cried out in mock terror, holding up her hands. 

"The next question, then," Kurt went on, resuming his pacing before stopping and pointing the mail at Lily again. "Is why don't you?"

Lily was starting to lose it again. "I'm not his confessor," she got out between the giggles. "I don't quiz him on his personal life." Point of fact, Lily thought Piotr liked her precisely because she didn't. 

"You should get into the habit," Jean told her as she went to the fridge and took out a plastic container, opening it up to double-check its contents before floating it over to the counter and reaching for some vegetables. 

"If he wants me to know, he'll tell me," Lily replied with a shrug. "And now that the inquisition is over, can I ask about my son?"

"Dane is dozing happily in the sun room," Kurt replied, finally putting the mail down so that he could sort it on the table. "Amanda is with him."

While Jean made sandwiches, Lily poked her head into the sun room. Amanda was reading and looked up and smiled, indicating that Dane was still asleep on the large round couch next to her chair. Lily could see his head from the doorway, tiny fist curled underneath and eyes closed. She nodded and went back to the kitchen.

* * *

"Mom!"

Starshine Beck turned towards the voice and waved at her daughter through the crowd by the luggage claim. Lily waved back. It was moments like these that Lily was sure that humans hadn't evolved so far away from the rest of the animal kingdom - they may look different, but like penguins and walruses and other animals, parents and children could identify each other by voice.

"Hey," Lily said as Star approached. She had to gingerly hug her mother as she was wearing a bulky backpack in addition to wheeling a large travel case. "How was your flight?"

"Did you know that the planes come in here directly over the water? It's terrifying," Star exclaimed. "I think I might take the train next time." 

"It would take you longer to get here and back than you'd be staying," Lily snorted, holding out her hand for her mother to give her the backpack. "What's _in_ this thing? I told you that you didn't need to bring any foodstuffs because there's a whole foods place a couple of blocks away..."

That had been only one of the conversations of various intensity that had led to Star standing in LaGuardia's Terminal C, along with a talk about air purifiers, acceptable toys for a ten-month-old electrokinetic (who had a tendency to take things apart and try to eat the components), and the relative safety of New York City. 

The visit had not been her idea. Lily had been invited to deliver a paper at an AIAA Fluid Dynamics conference (in glorious downtown Columbus, Ohio) and, upon finding out, her father had suggested that he come up for the week to visit and babysit so that Lily could attend where she would have otherwise had to decline. It had sounded great - three days with her father and son, four days in Ohio - until her father had suggested that Lily invite her mother to stay, too. Lily had quailed - three days, even with both Daniels around to run interference - was a lot, especially with the absolute certainty that Star would be critiquing both home and homemaker. But Daniel-the-elder had been insistent and, in the end, Lily just didn't have the heart to keep her mother from seeing Dane in person for the first time. 

"I brought some things for my grandson," Star announced in a tone of voice that implied that she was not going to allow the differences between mother and daughter to affect the relationship between grandmother and grandson. Lily wondered not for the first time if her mother couldn't see her inner thoughts as if they were teletyped across her forehead. Star put on the coat and woolen hat and gloves she had been carrying. "And you and Dan and your cat."

"We don't have the cat anymore," Lily said as she shouldered the bag, took the handle of the rolling bag from her mother before Star could react, and started walking. "I had to give him to a friend once Dane started moving around on his own in earnest. It wasn't fair to Felix to leave him in a situation where he was getting electrified a couple of times a day."

 _That_ had been hard. Lily would never admit it to anyone, but she had grown very fond of Felix. For both good and ill, Dane was fond of Felix, too, and, unfortunately, the feeling was mutual. Which meant that the poor cat was getting badly shocked every time Dane tried to pet him or Felix tried to snuggle. So Felix had been shipped down Broadway to Piotr's apartment, where the greatest risk was when the Logan twins would visit.

"Where are we going?" Star asked as they moved outside and past the taxi queue. "The taxis are over there..."

"We're taking the bus," Lily told her as she pointed towards the green-painted shelter a short distance away. A half-dozen people were waiting inside and a few more outside. A good sign, Lily thought, as that meant they hadn't just missed a bus. 

"The bus?" Star repeated, looking somewhat displeased. "Why?"

"Because it's a $35 flat fee into Manhattan by taxi and it's $2 a person to take the M60, which will take about the same time and will leave us four blocks from my apartment. I thought you'd be all happy about the bus - environment and all that."

"I'm not unhappy," Star protested. "I'm just... disoriented. This is my first visit to New York. I only know what I see on television."

"We'll try to do a few things while you're here," Lily assured her as they approached the shelter. "Are you cold? Do you want to wait inside?"

"I'm fine," Star assured her, then pointed a pink-gloved finger. "Is that the bus?" 

"Well, it's _a_ bus, but that's the Q48," Lily replied, standing back to get out of the way of the people in the shelter. "That's staying here in Queens. We want the M60."

Five minutes later, the M60 came. Lily let her mother carry her luggage on board and dipped her MetroCard twice to pay the fare. It was the middle of the day, so there were plenty of seats. Lily gestured for her mother to take one of the two-seaters and put her luggage on the other seat while Lily herself sat in the row in front of her and turned around to face her mother. As they crossed over the Triboro Bridge, Lily pointed out landmarks. Even after living in Manhattan for five years, the view was impressive. And a little skewed - Lily was still used to the view being from New Jersey, not Queens.

"Who's with Dane?" Star asked as the bus started down the ramp to the Manhattan toll plaza. 

"Amanda and Kurt," Lily replied. "They're old friends of Alex's. They had opera tickets last night and stayed with me afterwards. They adore Dane."

"Can they..." Star waved her hand vaguely. 

"Touch him?" Lily asked and Star nodded. "Not without a little magicks, but Amanda can whip something up for diaper changes and so forth. Although we all think Dane really just wants to see Kurt's hair stand on end."

"Magicks?" Star repeated, making an impressed face. Lily didn't think it was from seeing the Apollo Theater as they crossed 125th Street to the West Side. "I don't think I've ever really appreciated how deeply you're in... that world. And don't get upset with me for saying that. I'm honestly quite pleased and surprised."

"Surprised?" Lily asked, trying to keep her voice neutral. Did her mother think that she was narrow-minded? 

"I'm only digging myself in deeper, aren't I?" Star sighed, folding her hands in her lap. "It's just... I had so little hope for your spiritual side. You were always an engineer, Lily. Your father's daughter from the first time you saw your cousin's erector set. I tried to raise you to love all kinds and all things, but... you never showed any real appreciation for natural wonders and the diversity of life when you were younger. The universe was there to be calculated and measured and quantified and then conquered. I... I'm just sad that I've completely missed this growth of yours. It must have been wonderful to behold." 

"It wasn't pretty, Mom," Lily replied with a wry frown that she hoped covered up her discomfit at the honesty. "It wasn't some organic flowering. It was ugly and involved a lot of meaningful silences and nasty truths."

The bus turned on to Broadway and was soon stopping in front of Barnard College. Lily pointed out Columbia University across the street, and explained that she worked a couple of subway stops away. Star was shocked that so many schools could operate in such close proximity.

Another ten minutes and they were off the bus, heading west. Lily introduced her mother to Eduardo the doorman, who told her that her father was already in. He had taken the train up from Washington and had told Lily that he would need a lot less help navigating the way to her apartment than her mother would.

Everyone was in the kitchen when they arrived and Amanda was making tea for the adults while Kurt and Daniel were keeping Dane occupied in his high chair with some applesauce. If Star was at all surprised to see a blue-furred man holding a spoon and a cup of applesauce, it was completely overwhelmed by her reaction to seeing Dane. She squealed and came into the kitchen, barely waiting for Daniel to wipe Dane's mouth and hoist him up out of his high chair before reaching out. At the last moment, she remembered that this was no ordinary baby and paused. 

Dane, for his part, seemed intrigued by this new person. It bothered Lily immensely that at ten months old Dane already automatically assumed that people wouldn't touch him. He had never gone through an 'afraid of strangers' phase, but just seemed to... accept that he wasn't going to be picked up by anyone and never held his arms out except to his family and babysitter and the small handful of people who he saw often enough to recognize as 'safe' (such as Kurt and Amanda). Everyone else he'd greet with various degrees of enthusiasm - Dane was genuinely sociable, which made the limits on his interactions all the more wrenching - but made no attempts at contact. 

"Dane," Daniel said, holding him up and letting Dane wrap his fist around his thumb, "This is your grandma. Say 'Hi, Grandma'."

"Hi," Dane dutifully said. He would try to repeat single-syllable words (Lily had had to deal with him singing 'bub' for a day or so after an afternoon last month spent partly with Logan), but made no attempts at longer words.

"He looks just like a little Alex," Star murmured, lost in her wonderment. Lily grimaced - it was both her greatest joy and her greatest pain that her son was such a constant reminder of her missing husband. "Even more than in the pictures." 

With a slight nod from Daniel, she reached out to touch Dane's face. Lily could hear her sharp intake of breath at the shock, but Dane's sudden brilliant smile was the focus. 

Now sure that this was a 'safe' person, Dane held out his arms and Star took him. He tried to put his arms around her neck and leaned against her chest and Star turned to Lily, a look of utter love and happiness on her face to well match the contentedness on Dane's. 

"Is he always this friendly?" Star asked, her voice so very slightly tremulous. 

"Only with people who can pick him up," Lily replied, moving out of the way so that her father could get by and get his camera. She tried to sound casual, but the scene was affecting her deeply.  "Which just happens to be family and those who might as well be. He's a people person in general, but..."

"Oh, sweetheart," Star murmured to Dane, kissing the top of his head, "We'll just have to make up for everyone else. I can do that, I think."

Lily moved into the kitchen so as to be out of the way of her father taking pictures from the doorway. She watched from in front of the stove, Kurt's hand on her shoulder in silent comfort. Dane was basking in the attention. Like his father, he could be a ham (Lily wasn't sure if he understood the idea of the camera, but he'd grin like a pint-sized lunatic anyway) and he charmed everyone thoroughly.

After the picture taking was done, Lily took her mother into Dane's bedroom and said that she could hang her clothes in the closet if she so desired. Star wanted to shower after her trip, so Lily retrieved towels, pointed the way, and returned to the kitchen. Kurt and Amanda departed in the late afternoon - Kurt was due back at XSE headquarters - and Lily was left alone with her parents.

She took them out that evening for dinner - thankful that her mother was still on her best behavior and not insisting upon anything - and pointed out the Whole Foods on the way back. Her parents refused to switch beds with her, using the sofa-bed instead. 

Three days later, Lily was back on her way to LaGuardia, this time to catch her own flight. The time with her parents had been remarkable for its peace - she hadn't fought with her mother once, not even when Star had suggested wheat gluten as a dietary option for Dane. It was Spring Break week at school, so she had been able to take her parents around town - to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Natural History, around midtown and up into Central Park. There had also been constant lessons in how to deal with Dane's electricity - Lily had belatedly realized that what was now second nature to her was not at all obvious to anyone else. As she went through airport security, she tried to release her fears about an incident. There undoubtedly _would_ be one - she herself was not perfect in dealing with Dane's voltage - and there was no point stressing about it. She was a little worried about how Dane would take her absence, especially as she was such a constant presence in his life, but pushed these thoughts away as well. Dane was with people who loved him, Jean and Scott had been alerted to Lily's absence, and her parents had been left emergency contact numbers. 

By the time she got to the hotel in Columbus, Lily was able to focus on the weekend conference ahead and not what she had left behind. 


	17. November 2008

There was a knock on her open office door and Lily looked up, then made a surprised face. "Nathan! What a surprise! How are you? How are Clare and Domino?"

She stood up as Nathan entered the room. Watching him walk so tentatively leaning on his cane was always disconcerting. He was still such a strong mind, such a strong presence, that physical weakness seemed wrong. "Everyone is well, thanks," he replied as he sat down a little heavily.

The top of a blond head appeared above the edge of the playpen and two blue eyes peered out. "Hi."

"You're feeling sociable now, huh?" Lily asked her son, who turned to look at her guilelessly. "You didn't even budge when we had visitors earlier."

Dane was quiet, occasionally quiet enough that Lily would get worried even though Jean had told her that there were no developmental problems and that he was actually quite bright for his age. Although Dane seemed to understand quite a bit, he didn't talk much and he was not given to displays of temper. He'd sit and play with his toys even when Lily had students in during office hours, not disrupting and not making noise. Orly had gotten him a mirror that came up from the corner of his playpen like a satellite dish and Lily had noticed that Dane loved to watch anything that happened in the office. She'd often catch him watching her - she'd look up at the mirror, see her son's face reflected, make a face herself, and hear him laugh. He had a wonderful laugh. 

"Hello, Dane," Nathan replied with a small smile. Dane let out a cascade of laughter as he suddenly found himself being levitated into the air. "You're getting big."

"Big," Dane agreed, holding out his arms in the hopes that Nathan would hold him. Dane knew it was possible - he had gotten picked up at Clare's birthday party the previous weekend. Apparently the techno-organic virus allowed Nathan to hold him without discomfort (Lily didn't know if Nathan even had sensation on that side of his body) and he settled the toddler on his left side.

"Not that I'm not always pleased to see my favorite nephew," Lily began with a grin as she sat back down. "But even though you're not in uniform, I'm assuming this isn't a social call."

Nathan's eye flashed - after all this time, Lily knew it was a flash for humor and not one of anger - and he telekinetically opened up the briefcase he had brought with him, floating a thick folder into Lily's hands, all without disturbing Dane, who was watching raptly. She wondered what sort of magical world it must be for her son that he didn't bat an eye at telekinesis - it was no more or no less weird than anything else. 

"I've been... sensing things," Nathan began, frowning as if to acknowledge the uselessness of such vague statements. "I can't tell what they are or what they mean. All I know is that they're real and they're dangerous."

Lily opened the folder, completely unsurprised to see printouts of what she knew were models of the time stream. This was what she had spent the months before Akkaba studying and perfecting - how to predict the magnitude and nature of disturbances and then to calculate their effects. It was what she had been working at on her own since then - Nathan had seen her conclusions, had discussed ramifications and whether to make any of the results public. It had been decided to keep things quiet. Nathan was worried about someone powerful taking the information and using it against the world while Lily's were much more mundane concerns - she didn't want to blow her burgeoning reputation in the field by turning into a Sagan-esque loony talking about bending time. 

"Not to treat your instincts lightly," Lily said, skimming the pages of graphs and charts, "Because that would be pure folly. But is there anything more... concrete than just a sense of foreboding?"

By the sixth page, however, something was starting to set off her own sense of warning even before Nathan replied. She stood up and went over to the table behind where Nathan and Dane were sitting, where she usually sat with students and tutored. She spread out the graphs on the table, noticing in her peripheral vision that Nathan only turned to face her and did not get up out of his chair. 

"Ever since Akkaba, I've been... more tightly bound to the timestream," Nathan explained thoughtfully. "I've always been the biggest disturbance, but now... I've got a very close relationship to the current itself, I think."

Lily turned to look at him, understanding what he was saying just as she understood all that he was not saying. Whatever had happened to him at Akkaba had changed him on a much more fundamental level than he had let on. And he hadn't told anyone. That was why he was being vague - because whatever this change was also happened to be the reason he could tell that there was trouble down the line. And he was trying to keep his secret even as he knew he was the only source of information. And there _was_ trouble down the line. Running back-to-back, the graphs showed a definite pulse, albeit a faint one. 

"Well, your... relationship has been your bounty this time," Lily said slowly, looking back at the graphs before moving over to the blackboard. Maintenance had been through the room overnight and the board had actually been cleaned. She started the first equation at the top, writing in a smaller hand than her 'blackboard handwriting' so that everything would fit without needing to erase. Time was a compressible flow, more or less, and could be roughly translated into equations. "It looks like the ass end of a ripple."

As she wrote out the equations, referring to the folder for the values of constants that only applied to the time stream itself, Lily muttered. _This_ was why she didn't go public with her findings - unless you had the background, it was all science fiction; there wasn't enough direct connection to existing scientific knowledge. "If you've got a big enough rock, no matter how strong the current of the river, you're going to get a ripple going upstream that is strong enough to be felt. The readings you have are really, really faint. But they could be the far edges of that upstream ripple."

"The effects of a future event being felt before it happens," Nathan mused, gently disentangling Dane's hands from the contents of his shirt pocket. 

"It could be," Lily agreed. "It could also be a few other things. It's really too early to tell. It could be something completely innocuous. The time stream is like every other non-theoretical flow - it's not perfectly smooth."

"I can't take that risk," Nathan replied, exhaling loudly. "I can't... I'd rather look paranoid than be caught unprepared. I've had everyone who has experience with temporal anomalies working overtime to come up with something, anything that this could be related to, but they've got nothing. There is nothing going on right now - even in the theoretical stages - that could cause this kind of... headache."

"And you mean that literally, don't you?" Lily asked pointedly as she collected the papers she had spread out across the table. 

"I need your help," Nathan said instead, looking down at the toddler in his lap rather than answering the question. "I need to know what and when."

"I never mastered the 'what,' Nathan," Lily sighed as she took the folder back to her desk. She dropped it heavily and sat down with the same gracelessness. "I can tell you how and why. Even the when is going to take a phenomenal amount of effort. The time stream... if any of the work I've done since Akkaba has proven anything, it's that for every rule of fluid dynamics the time stream follows, there is another one where either it's a special case or there's a factor we haven't figured out yet. It took us three months to come up with a workable schematic for rate of flow. That's one of the most basic elements... To get what you want here... I don't know."

"You did it at Akkaba," Nathan objected, telekinetically bringing Dane's plush rabbit out of his playpen and into his outstretched hands. 

"That was short-range," Lily pointed out, shaking her head and frowning. "The time between cause and effect was minimal so it was easy to map out the function. I also had a room full of people and a couple of hundred data sources."

"You could have that again," Nathan said, shifting in his seat. Lily idly wondered if sitting for long stretches was uncomfortable for him, although stillness was not a trait she associated with him in general. "All of those resources and more. Plus the XSE."

"At the risk of sounding callous and cold for ignoring the fate of the world in favor of more petty concerns," Lily sighed, leaning back. "What you're asking for is a full-time job. With overtime... I want to help you, but... This is going to be a project that's going to be intensive now and it's going to have to develop long-term protocols to deal with situations as they come up in the future. Small-scale, you're going to need to set up a permanent system within the XSE or your network..."

"They're basically integrated now," Nathan interjected. 

"Fine," Lily said, waving her hand vaguely as that wasn't the point of what she was trying to say. "But that's just small scale. Large-scale... You're going to have to come up with a completely new science of time. Develop a whole new area of study. This isn't a one-person job. You're going to need some computational fluids experts and probably even a couple of experimental people, not to mention covering stats, pure math, a theoretical physicist or three… And all of this is pretending that we don't know that the social sciences aspect of this is totally undeveloped. We didn't need it at Akkaba and there's been nobody working on it in between. Data collection, relevancy scales… whole divisions to do tasks I can't even imagine right now. This isn't a quick start-up kind of business, Nathan."

"It's going to be done a lot less quickly and a lot less well if you're not involved," he replied. "I didn't ask for your help at Akkaba just because you were Alex's wife. You have the best combination of youth, intellect, and imagination for this precise task. That was true then and it's true now. Even more true now because of the work you've done since then on the time stream. This interests you - the creation of a new science. And we both know that you'd rather be doing this than trying to get a bunch of second-rate students through to their B.S. degrees."

Lily sighed again. She hated that he could so easily cut through to the core of the issue. "I'm not going to lie and say I'm not fascinated by all this. I am. But I'm also a civilian, Nathan. I'm not a superhero, I'm not XSE. I have to teach - I'm up for tenure review next semester - and taking care of Dane is not going to get any easier now that he's running around and taking things apart when I'm not looking..." 

Understanding some of what was said that pertained to him, Dane giggled and Lily smiled at him in spite of herself. Dane, as her parents were all too eager to point out complete with the smugness of grandparents, might look just like Alex but he acted just like she had at his age. There was nothing he wouldn't take apart and play with, from the television remote to the Beaufix construction set that Kurt had gotten him.

"This setup isn't a permanent solution," Nathan said, waving his free hand around the room. "What are you going to do when Dane gets too old to sit in his playpen all day? Your babysitter isn't going to be here forever. And we both know that you don't want to spend the rest of your academic career here."

Lily closed her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair. She hated not being able to deny any of what Nathan was saying. He was right - she had never intended to stay at City College long enough to be up for a tenure review, let alone at a point where she was plotting on how best to accomplish it. She was very worried about how long Dane could be kept occupied in a corner of her office - the highlight of his day was to get outside and get taken to a park where he could run around. And Shalit... Shalit made no bones about the fact that she had come to New York in part to look for a husband as well as to earn her degrees. And now a junior, she was close to accomplishing all of her goals.

"I know the real reasons, Lily," Nathan said quietly. She opened her eyes and he was watching her, the furrow in his brow gone and an almost peaceful look about him. "I know because I tried to do it, too... You won't be losing your independence. You won't become part of the big XSE-but-really-the-X-Men machine. You won't fall into what Alex ran from... That's really what this is about, isn't it? Alex."

Lily looked at him sharply. "What has Alex to do with this? Apart from the obvious part where I'm the single mother raising the electrokinetic baby?"

The electrokinetic baby in question was watching the exchange with an intense gaze that Lily found disturbing. Dane's focus, like his silence, was uncanny for a toddler and if it weren't for the fact that the former was occasionally turned on people as well as objects, Lily would have had him tested for autism.

"Do you think it goes unnoticed that you've resisted almost every offer to help?" Nathan asked instead. "Take it from my own personal experience - they've picked up on it. Every spurned invitation, every hint intentionally ignored, they notice. And keep tally. You take only what help that will let you stay as far away as possible."

"What does this have to do with anything?" Lily repeated, shaking her head in wonderment at where this train of thought could have come from.

"I'm not asking for your help because I'm looking for a way to keep tied you to the mansion," Nathan said, letting Dane on to the floor as he was trying to wiggle off of Nathan's knee. "This isn't an offer being made because I don't trust you to put your own best interests ahead of your pride. I'm asking for your help because I need it. To find someone else with your expertise and knowledge that can handle everything else that this project will involve... It can't be done. I've looked. Theoretical fluid dynamics isn't producing the sort of people I need right now. I would have left you to wallow if I could have. I'm not in the business of saving souls when they don't want to be saved."

Lily had been watching Dane wander carefully around the office, but she turned to look at Nathan sharply. "It's good to know neither injury nor fatherhood have dulled your instinctual abilities to be an asshole."

Nathan shrugged. "You were there when I needed you at Akkaba. When the world needed you. And now you're needed again."

Is this how it goes, Lily asked herself. Is this what Alex felt like every time Scott called late at night? "I'm not the same person I was then, Nathan. I'm not in the same situation. I have too many responsibilities to just drop everything and follow my curiosity. I'm not..."

"Carefree anymore?" Nathan asked with surprising gentleness. "You never were, but along with that realization came a great deal of strength. You should use it for something other than keeping everyone away from you. Trust me. Our family will meddle less that way."

There were times when Lily really hated being related to telepaths. She was never sure whether they were grasping at straws or seeing the truth.  Of course, one probably didn't need be a telepath if Lily was being as transparent as Nathan seemed to think she was. He really didn't see her often enough to be able to comment otherwise and she couldn't imagine him sitting around and discussing her with Jean or Scott.

"I can't force you to help me, Lily," Nathan said, standing up with a hiss of pain even as he raised himself telekinetically. "I know that in the end you probably will because of who you are. And I will promise you that I won't take advantage of that."

"At least not too much," Lily retorted, mostly out of a lack of anything else to say. 

Nathan made face that she couldn't read and she was about to say that she'd think about it, but there was a knock on the door. "Enter!" 

It was her office hours and personal business had to take a back seat. As if by unspoken agreement, Nathan nodded and teleported away. He must have said a telepathic goodbye to Dane, however, as the toddler turned and waved goodbye. 

"Professor Summers?" A head popped in. "Are you free?"

"Sure," Lily replied, gesturing for the young man to come in as she put the folder in her backpack and moved around the front of the desk to retrieve Dane. "Leave the door open. I just didn't want my son wandering off into the hallway... Okay, Dane, back to prison for you."

* * *

"Hey Jean, how are you?... No, nothing major going on here. I'm vacuuming and Dane' s busy with his latest new toy... A fire truck. My father sent it... Yeah... He figured it out right away, actually. I felt bad laughing at him screaming in fright when the siren went off when he touched it, but... Yeah, he spent the rest of the day trying to see if any of his other toys would do the same thing. I'm going to have to start buying him battery-powered toys now... Yeah, although I don't think the money saved on batteries is going to cover the costs to wire everything else so that he doesn't blow them up... Dane! What did I say about making the lamps glow like that?... Sorry about that... Yeah. That's his other new trick. He giggles like a lunatic and I get scared to death... So what's new?... _Really?_ Wow... Congrats... How far along are you?... Well, it won't be November or May, so you've got that in your favor... Yeah, that sort of blew my mind when I thought about it, too. It's a little easier if you just think of it in terms of Clare and not Nathan, but then again, I'm a lot less used to this family than you are. How's Scott taking it... No, I can imagine... Well, at least you've already pulled the disappearing act, you know?... You don't have to not mention it, Jean. I mean, it's going to come up. I'd honestly rather people talked about Alex than go out of their way to not bring him up in my presence... I know nobody's forgotten him, but... Yeah... Umm, next week is better... Tuesday? Okay. No, we can take the train up... Actually he does, but the MetroNorth can take it... Okay. Will do... See you then... Yeah. And congratulations... Bye."

* * *

"Be careful," Lily called after Dane as he ran down the hallway towards their apartment door. 

Almost on cue, Dane tripped and fell, landing with a quiet 'oof.' Lily ran over to him, but he looked up at her more confused than hurt - it was a carpeted floor and he was wearing enough layers to ward off the late February chill that she honestly didn't think he _could_ hurt himself. She bent down to pick him up, but Dane squirmed out of her grip and continued to race towards the door. 

Lily was fairly sure what the excitement was about. Dane had mastered doorknobs the other week and was eager to put the skill to good use. He arrived at the door with a thump and reached up with mittened hands for the doorknob. "It's not going to open for you, sweetie," she told him as she fished her keys out of her backpack. "It's locked."

He tried again anyway, his covered hands sliding over the brass knob.

"Me," Dane insisted, trying to block Lily from approaching. 

"I'll let you open the door," she promised with an amused sigh. "But let me unlock it first."

Dane narrowed his eyes at her and Lily laughed in spite of herself. Raising her son was turning out to be a complete revelation in terms of her at-one-time firmly held beliefs of nature versus nurture. There were certain things Dane did - like make that face - that were so utterly Alex... "How about you help me unlock the door?"

Putting down the bag of groceries, Lily offered her keys to Dane and picked him up so that he could put the key in the lock. It took a few tries for him to get the right key into the slot and Lily held his hand so that they could turn it together before putting him down. She unlocked the second lock and took off Dane's mittens. "Set to, Junior."

The doorknob turned far enough on the third try and the door swung open. Lily turned on the light before picking up the grocery bag as Dane ran to the front closet and pulled off his hat and worked on unzipping his jacket, the mittens dangling from their strings on his cuffs. 

"Just leave your shirt on this time, okay?" she asked him as she took the groceries into the kitchen. Dane's other favorite activity these days was stripping. 

By the time she returned to take off her own coat, a still-shirted Dane was sitting next to the pile of his outerwear and picking at the knots in his shoes. Everyone had suggested that Lily get Velcro straps for him so that he could do them himself, but there was a method behind her madness. If Dane couldn't take his shoes off, then he wouldn't take his pants off and if he couldn't take his pants off, then the diaper stayed on. He kicked his feet expectantly as Lily put away both of their coats and his hat.

A half-hour later, they were in the kitchen listening to the news as Lily made dinner. An hour after that, they were making a mess as Dane splashed around in his bath and sang a mostly-nonsensical version of one of the Sesame Street songs from the CD Sanjay and Adrian had sent him for Christmas. And an hour after that, after a story that involved the adventures of a bright blue anthropomorphic hippopotamus (whom Dane insisted on calling Kurt, despite the fact that he was named William), Lily sat on the couch with her feet on the coffee table, a cup of tea by her ankles, and a pile of quizzes on her lap as she listened to Dane sing himself to sleep. 

The quizzes were eventually carried into the kitchen so Lily could make tea as she was starting to nod off herself. After finally grading the last of them, Lily dropped the folder back in her backpack and pulled out the dark blue binder. It unlocked upon her touch to the sensor panel - Reed Richards had designed fingerprint locks small enough for use on documents. Lily had been given a set of the latest design for her own use, but this one had the XSE logo stamped upon the cover and was full of Nathan's own notes. 

As he had said - and as Lily had known - she had agreed to help him out. The work, in short, was overwhelming in scope, in magnitude, in importance, and in significance. Very little headway had been made thus far - mostly it was just verifying data points and running the same sets of trials in hopes of new ideas coming to light. Nathan had thrice teleported her down to the 'head office' in the New Lands, a benign looking facility (from the outside) that was run with only indirect links to the XSE. It was becoming increasingly evident to both Lily and Nathan that more money and more manpower were necessary. 

Nathan had not yet asked Lily to join the research team full-time, but they both knew that it was coming. Privately, Lily wondered what she'd say when Nathan finally did ask. Her situation at City College had been unsettled all semester and was growing more so with each passing week. The tenure review committee was being... belligerent, although Lily was hesitant to use the word with anyone affiliated with school. The questions were informal, the committee hadn't scheduled any official meetings with her yet, but Lily didn't need to be a telepath to see what was going through their minds. Why else would they be asking the questions they asked her?

They knew of her XSE connections - hell, four of the members had signed the condolence card that had been passed around when Alex had disappeared. But only now was it being considered anything other than casual. They had heard that the head of the XSE had visited her office on more than one occasion. Was it during her office hours when she should have been focusing on her students? Was she accepting research projects from the XSE or did she see herself doing so in the future? Both her late husband and her son were mutant energy producers - did she see herself focusing more exclusively on the formal study of those sorts of fluid mechanics? Did she see herself becoming active in the mutant cause? 

The personal nature of the questions was not especially surprising. Academia was not about pedagogy; it was about politics. And the ME department had a responsibility both to City College and the City University of New York as a whole to, well, make sure that Lily was not going to be a political problem. It galled Lily that a public university - one that by law had to accept anyone with a New York City diploma, be they mutant or baseline human - would worry about this. She should have been an asset to them - female, practically bilingual (her first two semesters of teaching classes with two dozen Koreans a section had convinced her to go back and brush up on her grammar), a well-respected young person with superb connections. Hell, her mutant ties should have been a bonus - there were almost no 'outed' academics.

But none of that was the case. Instead of focusing on the grant money Lily had won to substantially improve the fluid study capabilities of the EFMA lab, they wanted to know why she had thanked Princeton's labs in her latest paper on supersonic flow instead of her own. (They had the facilities to create the cross-flow distortion effects she needed and City didn't.) Instead of focusing on how she had been interviewed for a position at MIT, the committee wanted to know how seriously she had considered the offer from President Lehnsherr of a fellowship at the recently established University of the New Lands. (She hadn't; Magnus had made the offer despite knowing that the facilities for the Engineering School - namely the labs - would not be ready for another three years.) They even wanted to know if Lily was considering retiring from teaching to take care of her son. 

Basically, Lily had decided - and Sanjay had concurred, when she had spoken to him last - that the committee was simply looking for a good justification to deny her tenure. It was frustrating, but it was also a relief - truth be told, even if Nathan wasn't tempting her with an offer to follow her professional interests with a functionally unlimited budget, Lily was ready to move on. She just needed to be pushed. But whether it would be moving on to the Midnight Sun Laboratory in beautiful downtown Biosphere Three, Lily had not yet decided. Even if there were no other immediate teaching offers, she had enough connections to wrangle out a decent 'visiting scholar' position. There were possibilities. 


	18. April-June 2009

"You're sure?"

Lily sighed and nodded, not turning to face Orly as she watched Dane chase the giant blue ball across the grass. He was playing with Diego, Piotr and Callisto's foster child and his new best friend. Diego was three and had been abandoned by his parents after he had been born with skin that secreted a thick, green mucus that hardened like candle wax. It was unattractive, admittedly, and Dane had initially been very apprehensive. But Diego was engaging and cheerful and knew the words to 'C is for Cookie' and his mutation apparently allowed for Dane to touch him and the two had eventually become fast friends.

"Look at him, Orly," she replied, gesturing with her chin where Diego and Dane had managed to get to the ball just before it rolled on to the blanket where Piotr and Callisto were sitting with eight-month-old Flora, their other current ward. Flora had tiny, leathery wings (nobody knew whether they'd ever grow large enough to support her weight) that fluttered in aggravation as the ball approached. "He's happy. He's deliriously happy. He's getting to run around and play like a normal kid... He never gets to do that. He sits with me in my office all day, trapped in that damned playpen - when he's not trying to climb out of it - and look what it takes to get him an afternoon in the park."

She waved her arm expansively at the perimeter that had been set up, each pair of adults at opposite ends, to keep the children separate from the throngs of people on the Great Lawn enjoying the warmth on this early spring day. It was heartbreaking that even their liberty had to be so circumscribed... Dane's liberty, at least. Unspoken was that while Dane needed to be kept apart for everyone else's safety, Diego and Flora had to be protected from the cruelty of others. Flora's scars had not yet healed from where her birth mother had tried to cut off her wings with a knife and, more immediately, they had already heard a few unpleasant comments from passersby in the hour that they'd been there. 

"In the New Lands, it won't be such an effort. They have daycare and schools that can handle all sorts of mutations. Dane won't have to be so... tentative," she went with a sigh. "Everyone's always going on about how well behaved he is. He _has_ to be and he knows it."

"But all of this care only has to last until Dane is old enough to start to learn how to control his powers," Orly reminded her. "He'll have plenty of time to embarrass the hell out of you with public temper tantrums when he's older."

"This is when his personality gets established," Lily said as she got up to retrieve the ball that had rolled past where the boys were allowed to wander. She picked it up and tossed it back toward the pair, who promptly both tried to catch it and nearly collided. She then sat back down on the blanket, taking care not to sit on Dane's latest toy, a robot that looked a little disturbingly like an early model Sentinel but to which Dane was utterly attached. 

"The less damage that gets done now..." she went on. "He's always known that something's different, but now... he's starting to notice his limitations. We take a walk down in Riverside Park and we pass by the jungle gym and he used to ask to go play, you know, point at the slide and stuff. But you can't explain to an eighteen-month-old that you can't let him on the slide or the little castle because they've got metal and there are other kids playing on them. All he understands is the 'no' part. So now he doesn't ask anymore. And then there's the rigmarole when we go to the market or to the museum or anywhere where there's a lot of people... All he hears from me is 'no' in some form or another. He's going to be two in three weeks, Orly. And it's only going to be getting worse." 

Orly nodded, then smiled crookedly. "So the move to the New Lands has nothing to do with that think tank job that just happens to let you do what you've always dreamed of doing - at least professionally?"

"Well, obviously they're related," Lily agreed, grinning. Orly was one of the only people who knew the truth about what Lily was going to be doing. Or at least that the XSE or Nathan Summers had anything to do with it. Professionally, it was a coveted job - an extremely well funded lab doing cutting-edge research, all without the demands of teaching. There had been a little bit of grumbling within the fluid dynamics community that someone as young as Lily had walked away with the position of group leader, but not enough for anyone to get suspicious. Getting out of her contract with City College had been straightforward and the agreement with the tenure review committee had been as acrimonious as it had been easy. Lily wouldn't press genetic discrimination charges and they would bury their report that would have denied her tenure. The official reasons for her departure had been a vaguely phrased memo describing a shift in the program's focus away from theoretical fluid dynamics, which happened to be her specialty. 

"But..."

Lily exhaled slowly. "But it's going to be a relief," she admitted. "It's so hard, Orly. Raising a baby by yourself - even with the support I get from you and everyone else - it's hard. But Dane... I always have to think five steps ahead. Can I take him food shopping or for new clothes? Whenever we go anywhere, I have to factor in enough time in case we have to take the next bus or the next subway because they're too crowded for me to keep Dane from touching anyone. Winter is the easiest season because I can swaddle him in insulated clothes. But it's spring now and he's more active. I don't go anywhere because everything has to be weighed in terms of the very tiny pool of people who can baby-sit him... I don't want to resent him. I never, ever want to resent him."

"I don't think you're capable of it," Orly assured her, opening up the insulated bag they had brought and taking out the container of grapes. Lily watched - Orly's new prosthetic arm had a hand that was capable of much finer tasks. "Or at least I think you're more capable of, I don't know, restraining your baser impulses. You're not supposed to like your kids all the time. The trick is to remember to love them all the time." 

"Sometimes..." Lily said quietly. "When it's an hour before I'm due to teach and he's just dumped his cereal all over the place after already having blown up two of the three light bulbs in the living room lamp for the second time in a week and I have to figure out how to keep him out of the way as I clean up broken bulb glass and then cereal and then change him and then, when we finally get to the subway, I have to let two trains go by because they're too crowded and he's crying because he knows I'm upset about the lamp and the cereal... I'm capable of a lot. So far, restraint has always been part of that lot. But... He has to be so, so good all the time. And my sanity can't be dependent on him being perfect. Because he's two and he's supposed to be closer to hellspawn than perfect."

"You know, there are moments when I watch you and Dane and I get maternal urges," Orly mused thoughtfully. "And then I remember myself."

Lily laughed, her distress broken up. Orly was cheerfully single, happy to have a job she enjoyed (in a lab that developed prosthetics) and the freedom that went with a comfortable living and very few responsibilities. She had bought a small house a couple of years ago, determined to not give up her dreams of a vegetable garden and a back porch to read on just because she didn't have the husband and kids to go with the white picket fence. Lily wondered how similar her life might have been had Alex never walked into it. But she had always dated more than Orly and had never gotten into the mindset where being permanently single had been either a consideration or a concern. 

"Mommy!" Dane called out, approaching at a rapid speed with Diego in hot pursuit. "Juice!"

Orly dug around in the cooler for Dane's cup. The two boys flopped down - Diego somewhat gracelessly as the hardened mucus around his joints made his movements stiff. 

"What do you say?" Lily asked Dane as Orly found the cup. 

"Please?" Dane offered, holding out his hands. 

Orly handed him the cup. "Diego, would you like some crackers?"

"Yes, please."

"Dane," Lily prompted as she fished out the Saltines and put the grapes within Dane's grasp.

"Thank you," he told Orly, who rolled her eyes at Lily as Dane concentrated on his cup.

"Thank you," Diego said as he was given the crackers. 

"Piotr and Callisto have your juice if you want it," Lily told him. Diego's diet affected his condition and he was unable to eat many types of food, notably most kinds of fruit. For a three-year-old, he was a fastidious eater, doing his best to make sure his cracker crumbs ended up in the baggie. Because the mucus extended to his fingertips, where it would frequently flake off during activity, Diego also didn't have to share his food.

With the boys occupied, Lily looked across at Piotr and Callisto. Flora appeared to be dozing in Piotr's arm, one of the only ways she could be on her back comfortably. In the year-plus that they had been together, Piotr and Callisto's story had gradually been compiled. And now that she knew most of it, Lily wondered what all of the fuss was about. It was straightforward as far as she was concerned - Piotr and Callisto were still the same people, at least part of them was, as when they had fallen in love the first time. That they could find that part in each other again, and that it would take time to do so, was much less of a shock to Lily than it was to most of the other X-family. Lily suspected she just had a different perspective because her ideas about the both of them hadn't ossified over the years. 

They were good for each other in obvious and not-so-obvious ways, Lily felt, and they complemented each other in temperament. Where she was tense, he was laid-back; where he would focus on his art, she kept an eye on his business. The one time Lily had discussed it with Kurt, he had more or less agreed with her own ideas, adding that they both had a strong need to protect and, while it was amusing considering their backgrounds as fighters, they could satisfy those needs by looking after the other. And the rotating posse of foster children (whom Bobby, well out of earshot of both of them, would affectionately call the Mini-Morlocks) who would stay in the extra bedrooms of their apartment - Callisto having given up the pretense of not living there sometime last summer. Before Diego and Flora, there had been Claudine and Jameel and Mikey and Shantiqua and Amy. Some had stayed for a few days until relatives could be found, others had stayed for a couple of months, but all had been very young children whose mutations had rendered them disfigured or even dangerous (Shantiqua had been a newborn who drooled acid) and unwanted. 

Lily happened to like Callisto, although they were not what Lily would call good friends. Callisto was still learning how to make friends, Ororo had said on her last visit to New York, instead of allies. Lily still got the impression that Callisto assessed everyone who crossed her path, checking to see if they were any threat to either herself or to Piotr or to their brood. Piotr, for his part, was happier than Lily ever remembered him being. 

"Mommy?"

Lily looked down. Dane was holding out his cup. "Are you done?"

He nodded. 

"You can give the cup to Orly, then," she said and he did. Next to him, Diego finished his cracker and stood up, handing the bag back to Lily. 

"Bye!" Diego said and ran off towards the blue ball. 

Dane used Lily's knee to stand back up and looked up at her thoughtfully. Before he could flee as well, Lily kissed his forehead. 

* * *

"Uh-oh."

"You know, Dane, I get really nervous when you say that. Is this the sort of 'uh-oh' where I have to get the fire extinguisher or the sort of 'uh-oh' where I can finish my paragraph and not lose my train of thought?"

"Uh-oh."

"I'm guessing we're closer to the former, then. All right. Mommy's computations can wait. Maybe I should teach you about Reynolds numbers and kill two birds with one stone. What do you think? Let's go see what the 'uh-oh' is all about. Lead on, Macduff."

* * *

"So Cecilia says that you found a place already."

The joint second birthday party for Dane and Nate Guthrie was in full swing and there was enough of a din going on that Lily didn't hear Bobby speak right away, at least not until Hank gestured behind her shoulder.

"Hmm?" Lily turned in her seat to face Bobby, who had sat down on the couch to her left. Keeping one eye on Dane, who was relatively easy to spot in his bright blue-with-green-streamers party hat, she smiled and nodded. "Oh. Yes. Although I had it pretty easy."

The New Lands Immigration Board, cognizant of the difficulty potential residents had in just dropping by to house-hunt, had an elaborate website set up to display homes and properties. Virtual 3-D tours, detailed lists of dimensions and features and amenities, proximity to schools and parks and public transportation. Between the website and Ji-Won and Ororo both visiting potential places, by the time Sulven teleported Lily up for her first on-site visit there was very little fuss. 

"It's a semi-attached," Lily elaborated, accepting the cup that Dane had brought over to her without examining its contents too closely. He was wearing the latest version of the energy absorbing/insulating clothes that Reed Richards had designed, but they were a short-term solution as they didn't seem to last for more than one usage. After Dane ran off again, she put it on the table next to her. "Three bedrooms, two baths, and a backyard."

"You're going all domestic on us," Bobby snorted. His eyes bespoke a more serious sort of happiness, though. "From Manhattan to Magnetoville."

"Actually, we'll be about an hour away from Aliyah," Lily replied. "It'll be sort of the same distance as from here to Manhattan. It's about the same level of urbanity, I guess, with paved roads and all that. But it's going to be weird, above and beyond the whole idea of moving there. I'll be able to do laundry at home... I haven't been able to do laundry without getting some sort of dressed in fifteen years."

"You're moving halfway across the world for the chance to do bleach loads," Bobby sighed. "I knew you were just trying to get further away from us... Kidding, I was kidding."

Lily still frowned at him. This was a sore topic in part because it seemed to be such a pervasive opinion.

"So what's going to happen to your apartment with you two gone?" 

"I'm renting it to a professor at NYU," Lily replied. "Just for the academic year. Then we'll re-evaluate."

"So no using it as the X-pied-á-terre?"

"With the way the housing market's gone in the city for the last couple of years, I am going to work off a serious chunk of mortgage with that rent," Lily said, shaking her head in disbelief. Without trying too hard, she was getting more than twice what her mortgage-plus-maintenance payments were. Of course, the fact that she didn't have to pay rent on her new home helped - a rather underhanded move by Nathan had worked a housing agreement into the contract she had signed to head up the project group.

"Hrrm," Bobby made a great show of considering. "Cecilia and I were thinking of moving into Manhattan after we get married. I know she wants to be back in the city - trees and grass and nature make her uncomfortable. But you're right about the costs. I think we're going to have to wait until the midtown office is open and we can have the official XSE townhouse... And speaking of being big as a house, it's the Good Year Blimp."

" _What_ did you just call me?" Jean asked as she sat down gracelessly in the armchair across from Bobby and Lily. At six months pregnant - with twins - not even Jean's telekinesis could compensate for the added bulk.

"The Good Ship Jean," Bobby said slowly and distinctly and with a completely straight face. "Don't start accusing me of making fun of pregnant women. I need Dana on my side when we play Monopoly." 

Dana was expecting in September, prompting many jokes about how if a Summers wife was pregnant, so was Dana.

"Hit him for me?" Jean asked Lily, waving vaguely at Bobby. "Oh, wait, I'm telekinetic."

"Hey!" Bobby wailed, standing up and pulling at his pants. "No wedgie! No wedgie!"

"So," Jean said and clapped her hands as Bobby went off, milking an overdramatic version of a sulk. "Now let's have some fun."

The afternoon was surprisingly light fare for an X-gathering, even considering that it was supposed to be a party, and the turnout had been high. There had been a Prime Sentinel attack in Long Beach, California the previous month and Bishop was still limping slightly from where a well-aimed pipe had cracked his femur. But he was still holding court by the buffet table, surrounded by Domino, Sam, Scott, and others that Lily couldn't see. 

Apart from her role as mother to one of the guests of honor, Lily was kept occupied by well-wishers. She had made it clear that she didn't really want a going-away party of any sort - a request that she suspected was being granted as much because the departure was close to Jean's due date as for any other reason. So instead there was a steady stream of the same few questions over and over again and Lily trying to come up with graceful ways to not give offense by smiling through suggestions that she invite people down for a housewarming party.

Eventually, a cake was brought out and the two little honorees were held up to blow out candles. Lily was able to avoid more questions by chasing after Dane with a wet paper towel after he had decided he liked the feeling of frosting between his fingers. He squealed mightily when Lily finally sat him down and gave him the choice of either eating his cake or playing with his toys and not the other way around. Jean, watching from the same chair she had fallen into before, wondered aloud what had made her think that she was ready to do this again after the horrors of the last time. Nathan, standing within earshot, tried to take umbrage and failed miserably.

It had been raining earlier, but the sun had come out during the course of coffee and the older kids - the twins and Clare and Diego - had been let outside under the supervision of Logan and Domino. Kate had taken Harry upstairs for a nap and things were settling down as the average age of the room got older. Nate and Dane were each surrounded by their own ring of toys, the centers of tiny solar systems of entertainment. Dane's attention was focused on a cube that was about the size of a Rubik's cube and just as colorfully decorated. But instead of stickers, the colors came from within as tiny lights that could be powered by Dane's mutation. It had been a gift nominally from the Logan twins, but Lily knew that Sulven had recreated it from something she had known in the thirty-eighth century - it was a toy for electrokinetics in that time.

Bobby and Hank and Warren were trying to explain the concept of a Rubik's cube to Joseph - complete with stories of peeling the stickers off to cheat - and the rest of the adults had quieted down to listen to the highly amusing discussion. It crossed Lily's mind that while she was really too young to have had much to do with the popular toys from the 1980's (she had had one, but only because everyone did), so many people present today had not been _around_ for the craze. Bishop, Joseph, and Sulven weren't in this time (Lily wasn't sure about Nathan), and folks like Domino and Logan might as well have not been in this time. 

Rogue's hearty laughter was still ringing off the walls when Sam entered the room. He had been fetching animal crackers for Dana - she hadn't been able to partake in the cake - and smiled reflexively in that way he had. The smile broadened when little Nate looked up at him, adoration in his eyes. 

"Dada!"

Lily didn't realize that she was holding her breath until she felt Dana's hand on her arm, warm feelings of sympathy coming from her like waves to the sand. The air came out of her lungs with a cough.

The two-year-old who had called out to be picked up by his father hadn't been Nate Guthrie. 

Shaking off the touch, Lily stood up, suddenly feeling very nauseous and as if the air was hard to breathe. She closed her eyes as she made her way past the collected group, as much to avoid the pitying looks as to hold back the tears until they could fall without witnesses. 

She didn't stop until she was in the hallway leading to the back door, far enough away from the living room that she didn't think her choked breaths would carry. Leaning back against the wall and letting herself slide to the floor, Lily gave up all semblance of control and wept. 

How could she think that she could do this? Raise Dane as if his father was simply away on a long trip and not instead missing since before his birth? She had always shown Dane pictures of his father and she kept a photo of Alex in his room. But who was she fooling - apart from herself? Apparently not Dane. And probably not anyone else, either. 

It had been two years, six months, and three days since Alex had vanished. There had been no trace, no clue, no hope. And no body. She knew that people openly wondered how long she was planning on waiting for Alex to return, how long before she gave up and accepted the truth that her husband was gone. That she was a widow in actuality, not temporarily. That her son would never know his father...

"Here."  

Lily looked up and saw a tissue in front of her. Scott was on the other end of the hand holding it. 

She accepted it with a nod of acknowledgement, wiping her eyes before blowing her nose. It wasn't enough, though, and before she could ask for another, the box appeared in Scott's other hand. 

"You want another, you have to get up," Scott told her, offering his hand for support. "You're not here often enough to know about the 'no brooding in the house' rule. We can go outside."

Lily grimaced at the weak attempt at humor and let herself be easily hoisted up. But instead of letting go, Scott pulled her into an embrace where she could feel the tissue box digging into her back. 

Whatever composure she had regained was lost again and she could only rely on Scott's strength to keep her from crumbling to the floor again. 

"It's okay, Lily," he murmured into her ear, kissing her hair. "It's okay."

"I don't think you really appreciate how strong you are," Scott said quietly in her ear as the sobs faded into hitched breaths. He didn't let go. "Not just for caring for Dane - and don't think that goes unnoticed. But... for handling what's going on with Alex."

The distant slam of a door startled them both. 

"Come on," Scott encouraged, guiding Lily towards the back entrance. 

The air outside was cool and damp and Lily breathed deeply, trying not to start crying again. Her sweatshirt was inside, but right now the air was bracing and not cold and it seemed to penetrate the fog she was drowning in.

It took a surprising amount of courage to turn around and face Scott. Over the years, she had gotten so used to the glasses that they no longer presented any sort of obstacle to reading his thoughts. Instead, she had learned that Scott's opacity came from within - it was just easier to blame the glasses. 

She didn't know why she expected him to be judging her. In fact, he was watching her impassively, the tissue box still in his left hand. No pity - Scott didn't pity, Lily was fairly sure. Pity was a passive reaction, compassion coupled with lethargy, and not Scott at all. 

"I'm running away, aren't I?" Lily asked, turning back to face the landscaped grounds. The rain had left everything bright and glistening in the emerging sun.

"Are you?" Scott asked, not moving from where he was leaning against the wall. "Or are you simply adapting?"

She sighed heavily. Scott would refuse to let her find the easy way out and answer her questions for her. It was a Summers trait, one that Alex and Scott and Nathan had in equal measure, even if they wielded it differently. "I don't know. I was so sure I was moving on, but... maybe I'm just running."

"From what, then?"

"From all this," she replied angrily, waving her hands vaguely. "From having to say the magic words 'my husband is dead.'" 

"You don't know that he is," Scott replied in an even voice. 

"So am I keeping the faith or am I just not dealing well with the lack of closure?"

"That's up to you," Scott said. She could hear him push off the wall, his shoes making quiet noises on the marble patio. "And there isn't a single person who can tell you which one is the right answer. Nobody. Not even Alex."

Once upon a time, in her darkest days, Lily had wondered what would happen if she and Alex ended up in Scott and Jean's shoes. What if Alex came back to find her with another man? What would she do?

"I'm scared to feel, Scott," she finally said in a quiet voice that she knew he could hear. "I'm scared to care about anyone other than Dane and you and Jean and the people I've known the longest... It's like if I did and... I couldn't bear to be unfaithful to him. I couldn't bear it... And sometimes, I... just feel so alone. Like I'm dying inside and there'll be nothing but a cold shell left. And that's just as bad. Because what happens if he comes back and my heart can't thaw?... And what happens if he doesn't come back at all? We know he didn't die that day, but what happens if he can't come back from wherever he is? What if he's stuck there? What if he died there instead of here? I'll never know."

"Probably not," he agreed. "But let's take this one step at a time. Do you think he's dead? In this world or any other?"

"I can't let myself think that," she answered. "Not yet. It's not fair to Dane."

"Forget Dane for a moment." Scott cut off her protest with a wave of his hand. "Dane is two and he's resilient. He's also never known his father, so it's all up to you. _You_ are all he knows. He's going to be fine no matter what. At least so long as you can find your peace."

"Sometimes I'm sure he's coming back... And sometimes I'm utterly, completely without faith." She closed her eyes and rubbed them, feeling the burn. "I set milestones. Four days for the first time he disappeared without saying anything, when he had to come back and tell me that he was Havok. Six months minus ten days for how long Nathan, Domino, Logan, Sulven, Dana, and Bishop were gone into the future. A year, two years, the anniversary of the Battle at Akkaba. The number of days Jean was gone..."

"It hasn't been that long yet," Scott pointed out. 

"I know," Lily agreed, opening her eyes again. "But when it comes, if Alex isn't back by then, I'll still do the same things. I'll make sure the apartment is clean, I'll make sure someone here knows where I'll be in case the Cerebro alarm goes off, and I'll jump at every sudden movement and every phone call just in case it's about him... Jesus. You must think I'm such a nut."

"I had my suspicions when you married my brother." Lily turned and looked at him and he shrugged. "Seriously? I'm a lot less concerned now than I was a couple of months ago."

"Why? Because I'm moving to Antarctica?"

"In part," Scott admitted. "Although I think it's more the motion than the destination that's important."

Lily laughed humorlessly. Neither Scott nor Jean had seemed surprised when she had told them that she was taking the job in the New Lands. And it wasn't simply because they had known about the offer being on the table. 

"Why is it that everyone in my life seems to think that I was digging myself firmly into a rut and nobody wanted to say anything?"

Scott chuckled. "Because you would have only started to dig deeper. This was something you needed to see for yourself, not be told. Trust me, we all learned how to do this the hard way with Nathan."

"I wasn't always this..."

"Intractable? Stubborn?" Scott supplied, rolling his neck. Lily could hear the joints crack. "No, you weren't. But you've had to do a lot of changing in the last couple of years."

"And apparently it's all been towards a more unpleasant, difficult person," she sighed, disappointed in herself. She had gone and done what she had sworn to herself she wouldn't do - become some sort of a bitter shrew. Everyone used different words, but nobody really disagreed with that assessment. 

"It's not all a change for the worse," Scott said evenly. "That same intractability is the reason you've got a happy, healthy two-year-old running around inside. We all wanted you to do one thing and you were stubborn enough to do it your own way to spite us all."

"Dane." Lily turned back towards the house, only to feel Scott reach for her arm and grab lightly. 

"He's fine," he assured. "Nathan's talking with him."

Lily nodded and Scott let go. 

"Am I hurting him?" Lily asked quietly. 

"Do you see him laugh, Lily?" Scott asked instead, turning back to face the lawn. "Do you see him run around and giggle and sing and play?"

"But how much of that is in spite of me?"

Scott only shook his head and smiled. "I always wondered what I must have sounded like."

"Huh?"

"Listening to you... I hear myself," Scott elaborated, sounding very much like his focus was someplace else. Sometime else. "Back when Nathan was Dane's age and Jean and I were in the future. Nathan was a lot like Dane, actually. They have similar temperaments and similar problems... Nathan would be running around and laughing and being an absolutely normal little boy and I'd watch him and instead of enjoying his happiness, I'd stand there and wonder how much of it was incomplete because of me. Because I had abandoned him as a baby, because I had gotten him into so much trouble with Madelyne, because if it wasn't for me, he never would have been infected in the first place..."

Lily just watched and listened. She had known Scott for almost a decade and known him well for most of that time and he had never spoken of those times with her. Jean had, and Alex had mentioned things he'd heard, but she'd never dared even broach the topic with Scott. 

"It wasn't until much later that I started looking at the whole picture. I was the one who taught him games and how to build things and how to ride a horse. I had brought him some of that happiness... It took me much too long to realize that any scars that Nathan was carrying weren't from my hand, but were instead from circumstance. I didn't learn that lesson in time for Nathan. I know it now, though, so maybe the twins..."

He broke off and sighed, shaking his head as if to clear it before turning to look at Lily. Glasses or not, she was sure he was meeting her eyes. "You're not doing Dane any harm. You are keeping him happy, healthy, safe, and loved. If he understands that he's different, it's not because he's being raised by you alone. It's because he's got a dangerous mutation. He was going to have that problem whether or not Alex was here to witness it."

"Intellectually, I know that," Lily admitted quietly. "But..."

"But it's still hard to accept," Scott finished with a nod of agreement. "And every time something slips out of your control, you can't help but wonder what you did wrong that you should have been able to prevent. Been there, done that, got the gray hairs to prove it."

Lily snorted. "Well, you've succeeded in getting me out of my funk. I've gone from maudlin to amazed at my own self-absorption."

"That wasn't my intention," Scott said, shaking his head. "I didn't mean to set us up as similar examples..." he broke off, laughing. "Jesus. It's like so many times when Alex and I would talk... Any similarities between our situations are coincidental, really. And you're only going to make yourself crazy using me as a paradigm. Alex figured that out eventually - I'm a freak..."

"You are not a freak," Lily interrupted. 

"I am," Scott insisted. "Within the mutant community and without it. And it's not necessarily all a bad thing. I mean, I did end up with the girl everyone was chasing."

Lily shook her head and smiled, wondering what Jean was saying along their telepathic bond. 

"It just means that I am not always the best person to use as an example," Scott went on. "And that's before we get into all of the amazingly dumb choices I've made in my own life. All I wanted to do when I brought up Nathan was... let you know that you aren't alone. That your fears are natural. It would be weird if you never doubted yourself. Insecurity is what makes us human."

"Yeah?"

"Galactic truth," Scott assured her with a smile. "That's how you can tell if anyone's been replaced by Skrulls or something like that. Extreme overconfidence. Not coincidentally, that's why you'll sometimes wonder if Nathan comes from another planet."

Lily couldn't stop the laughter from escaping. Not even when Nathan himself appeared a moment later on the other side of the back door, Dane visible by his knees. 

"Someone missed his mother," Nathan explained, telekinetically sliding the door open. He said something else in a language that Lily didn't even begin to recognize and Scott shook his head with a smile, but said nothing. 

"I'm sorry, Mommy," Dane said, looking very much like he had been crying heavily. He was still flushed slightly pink and his eyes were red and puffy. 

Lily swallowed the surge of self-abuse for letting her own emotions take their toll on Dane. "You have nothing to be sorry for," she told him emphatically, bending down to pick him up and wiping a fresh tear from his eyes. 

"You miss Daddy?" Dane asked, tilting his head and reaching for the tear running down her own cheek. "My Daddy?"

So that was what Nathan had been talking to him about. She turned back to the door, but Nathan was gone. So was Scott. "Yeah," she said, smiling her best seem-happy-for-the-baby smile even as the tears fell harder. "Very much."

"Me, too," Dane confided, leaning forward to hug her neck. He put his head on her chest and she could hear him sniffle. 

She hugged him tightly, even as it seemed to make both of their tears run faster. Dane was getting big and it was hard to hold him for long periods of time without feeling it, but by the time Lily felt composed enough to head inside, Dane was asleep. So she shifted him in her arms as best she could and was contemplating how best to open the door with no free hands when Piotr appeared, armed with the same tissue box that Scott had been holding. He opened the door without a word and silently offered to take Dane from her. Lily didn't want to loose the warmth of the closeness, but her arms were starting to ache and she relinquished her son. 

Dane moved over without waking up and Lily was blowing her nose with one of the tissues from the box she had taken from Piotr when she found herself in a one-armed embrace. 

"It was at Arcade's hands that I learned that sometimes I am stronger in my human form than I am in my steel form," Piotr said quietly as he let her go. "It is a lesson with a more general audience, I have subsequently learned."


	19. September 2009- March 2010

"Dominguez! What is this?" Lily called out without looking up from the report on her desk. "And why is it on my desk?"

Six weeks into her new job and Lily felt like she had been there for years. In a good way. 

"Yesterday's logs after they've been run though the news feeder," Amy Dominguez replied as she wheeled herself over to Lily's desk. A statistician by training, she was also a sniper-qualified marksman and had been a division commander at Akkaba, where she had been nearly sliced in half by a plasma ray. The wheelchair executed a nifty parallel park and Amy leaned forward to get a better look. "There was a higher-than-usual hit rate, so it got flagged. As for why it's on your desk, I figured that the possible importance outweighed the risk that it would get lost in this morass."

Lily made a face, but didn't comment. "This was checked for false positives?"

The Chronography group was unequally split into three subgroups. The first, the data sorters, was the smallest. They were the ones who filtered the reports coming in from the hundreds of field operatives and, by virtue of the fact that most of them had been performing this task for Cable since well before Akkaba, they were brutally efficient. Lily was happy that she had the least direct dealings with them - she had known some of them in the set-up to Akkaba and her antipathy hadn't abated with time. More than four years after the fighting and they were still largely suspicious of the applicability of pure science to what they considered an art. 

Amy rolled her eyes. "No, we figured we'd just drop unverified raw data in your lap in case you got bored or something," she replied. "Double checked. Sagerstein flagged this puppy himself."

After the data was collected, it was run against the results of the computer models. There were one hundred models being run at any given moment, a number that still staggered Lily every time she saw the bank of monitors or flipped through the generated Master Results. Every aspect of this operation was well-funded in terms of technology and both human and material resources, although the true extent of the support was kept quiet outside of the lab. 

"Not that I doubt your reading comprehension skills," Amy went on, "But I'll cut to the chase and tell you that forty-eight of the models were within a standard deviation of actuality. Thirty-seven when we amped up the requirements."

Lily's own research had pinpointed four key areas where current fluid dynamics theory could not explain what was happening to the time flow. Fifteen models were dedicated to each of the four areas and that meant sixty different possibilities (the other forty were tracking more established patterns) and a daily report that was bigger than a Manhattan phone book before it was boiled down to its relevant parts. 

"That's still pretty high," Lily observed with a smile, allowing herself a moment of self-satisfaction. "Five days in a row. I'm willing to call the latest refinement an early success."

"I'll bow to your genius later," Amy said dryly. 

Even before Lily had started work here, she and Nathan had put the bulk of the research in motion despite Lily being unhappy with the sample of data with which they had to work. The only real material available was from May 2005 on, although Lily didn't like to use anything from before July 2005, right before Akkaba. May had been when the initial time flow models had been set up and July was the earliest version of the mapping that Lily was comfortable considering as more fact than fantasy. It was still only four years' worth of data points from which to extrapolate the entire course of time itself. 

The work itself was not unusual apart from the scale - Lily had been involved in the project long enough that the idea that she was studying time instead of some more 'normal' fluid had stopped being so remarkable. Hypotheses were posited, tested by increasingly more rigorous and precise standards, and either discarded or advanced. Tests could be run against both real-time and historical data and functions were introduced and mapped up to five years in the future all within the normal course of business. 

"Hey, what's that on your computer screen?" Amy asked, gesturing with her pencil. The lab was set up like a newspaper bullpen with desks separated by low cubicle walls (low enough that Amy could see clearly over them seated in her chair) and the group leaders had no separate offices. Each cubicle was set up with desk space, state of the art computers, and a file cabinet. As lab head, Lily's perk was a double-sized work area with a small table for small conferences. 

Lily looked up. "Baby," she replied, mystified. Why was there a picture of a newborn on her screen? Her nephews had been born almost a month ago... Dana. "Junior Guthrie, I bet."

Lily pulled her chair over to computer, where an instant message was on the screen. She recognized the screen name as Jean's. "'On behalf of Mom Dana, Dad Sam, and Big Brother Nate'," Lily read. "'I proudly introduce Alison Guthrie, born at four-fifteen this morning and weighing in at a robust eight pounds, five ounces. Mom and baby are doing well and Nate seems to have gotten over the fact that he got a sister instead of a puppy.'"

"That's disgustingly cute," Amy commented cheerfully. She was one of the three people at the lab who knew the full scope of Lily's relations. "Why do you look so contemplative?"

"Jean didn't say anything about a mutation," Lily answered, still thinking to herself. It couldn't be...

"Maybe the baby didn't manifest," Amy suggested. "Not everything shows up at birth."

"Oh, I know that," Lily replied, shaking her head to clear her thoughts. "But even last month, when Colin and Ray were born, Colin manifested right away but Ray only tested x-positive and that's what they said."

"Contrary to your own little world, not every baby born post-Merge is a mutant," Amy snorted, reaching for the fat binder that had the current week's results in it. 

"What are the odds of two alpha-mutants producing a baseline-human baby?" Lily asked rhetorically. Privately, she wondered, if it was true, whether it would be blessing or curse. If being born without psionic skills was enough of a difference among the X-children, what about someone entirely without any sort of powers... Her eyes fell on the clipboard she had propped up on the other end of her desk. It was where she kept Dane's latest artistic masterpieces. Dane had taken to daycare well - exceedingly well once he realized that everything and everyone was 'safe' to touch. 

"Like I said, Summers," Amy repeated, not looking up from where she was flipping through the binder, "Your little microcosm doesn't exactly match the macrocosm anymore."

"Occasionally, I'm reminded of that," Lily replied ironically, pushing her chair back to where Amy was. "And every time, I ask why I don't notice it more. When did all of this stop being wondrous and frightening?"

"It was either when you married the superhero, correctly posited the foundations of chronography, or gave birth to the electrokinetic kid," Amy said, finally looking up. Lily frowned - Amy was making a subtle, humorous dig at the biography of that had circulated around Midnight Sun right after she was hired and before she joined. "Don't look at it as a loss of innocence. At each and every one of those points, you made a conscious choice to accept the fact that things weren't as you had always thought they were. It's a natural process. Like evolution."

"I suppose," Lily agreed reluctantly, then slapped the desk determinedly. "But this isn't the time or the place to get philosophical. Let's get back to reveling in our brilliance. You said thirty-seven of the models worked out at the narrower restrictions?"

* * *

"You're nervous?"

Lily looked at Nathan and frowned. "Yes."

They were sitting in the first row of the auditorium dedicated to the afternoon section of the Seventh Annual AIAA Conference on Flow Control, making pretend that they were listening to the end of the question-and-answer session that had followed Robert Liu's presentation. Lily was the next speaker, the topic of her talk a mystery to all but the conference organizers. 

"Why?"

A year of careful research, six months of intensive effort at the lab, and Nathan was ready to go public. Lily wasn't. It had nothing to do with keeping all of this magic and mystery to herself - she wasn't arrogant enough to think that she would come up with everything on her own. But... chronography. Real life, actual study of time itself. This was, as Ray Dagley, her doctoral advisor and current denizen of the fifth row of the auditorium's left side, would be sure to tell her later, 'crazy talk.' And Lily was terrified. But Nathan was the boss and Lily was the mouthpiece. 

She exhaled loudly. "Do you know where I was ten years ago? Taking midterms. Do you know where everyone on that dais was ten years ago? In tenured chairs at major research universities." Nathan was giving her his 'what does this have to do with anything' look and she frowned again. "I'm about to get up and announce the creation of a new branch of study. I'm about to tell a room full of people who were bucking up against the rules of fluid dynamics before I was a glimmer in my parents' eyes that they've been put behind the curve and that they are officially not at the forefront of the field. If this doesn't go _perfectly_ , I'm finished. I won't even be able to get a job loading up specs into someone else's Cray. I'll be working at Radio Shack and you'll be fighting an uphill battle that will make a nest of Prime Sentinels look like Clare's toybox."

"But you're right."

"And you know that has nothing to do with it," Lily whispered back. "I'm about to go up to that podium and make like I am not reading from a science fiction novel. Half of the people here have never knowingly had dealings with a mutant and I'm going to tell them that there is a segment of the mutant population that can exist outside of time. You can stand up and tell them that you're a chrono-variant mutant, I can show them the pretty graphs that show a direct correspondence between natural disasters and the timeline on one side and transient multidimensional fluid flow on the other and there's still a halfway decent chance that I'll get shouted off the podium before I can finish talking."

Lily smiled apologetically at Bob Liu, who had turned towards them as he stood at the podium. 

Lily understood why Nathan wanted to go public now. This wasn't garden variety R&D for a product - there was no advantage to secrecy. A disadvantage, perhaps. The sooner chronography became an 'open source' field, the sooner it could be improved upon and the sooner time itself could be harnessed. Or at least understood. And Nathan and the precogs had been almost vibrating with the increased stress of whatever was coming down the pike. The ripples were no longer isolated incidents; they were coming harder and faster and you didn't need to have been studying these things for years to know that something bad was going to happen. 

In a box at Nathan's feet were enough copies of a brief introduction to the chronography studies the lab had been working for the past year. Lily had stayed up all night for a week writing the damned thing. Everyone at the lab had been asked to read and comment on it. She had driven both Amy Dominguez and Roger Marlowe crazy by sending them countless revisions, not to mention asking Xiao, her lab partner and one-time roommate at Princeton, to read it as well as asking Orly, who had no experience in advanced fluid mechanics. Within the X-Men, Hank and Kate had given it a semi-amateur's once-over and Betsy had sent it to her brother, Lord Braddock. And, of course, Nathan had gone over it closely. Hell, she had even read it to Dane. And none of that made her feel any less like she was tap-dancing on the precipice of a very high cliff.

She had been presenting papers at conferences for a decade now, ever since Dagley had thrown her in front of two hundred gruff-looking fluid dynamicists and applied mathematicians at a hotel in Hong Kong and told her to talk. She wasn't worried about losing her train of thought or burping into the microphone. She _was_ worried about her future; she had been a good junior academic and had proven it by grinding out papers at an impressive rate and indulging in two different public debates and that only added to the reputation that had been granted to her simply by being Ray Dagley's protégée. But if this didn't go well, it was more than her name that got dragged through the mud. It was Dagley's, too, and Joe Perotelli's, and everyone else who had helped her to get to where she was.

When the applause petered out for Bob Liu, Lily's stomach flipped over like it hadn't since she had been pregnant and she was glad that she hadn't eaten lunch yet. Josephine Rapanato got up to introduce her and Lily closed her eyes before standing up. She felt a wave of... comfort? Confidence? From Nathan and grimaced tightly in gratitude. 

"You were making me nauseous," he told her. 

If anyone in the room had recognized Nathan as the head of the XSE, nobody had said anything during the pre-conference coffee buffet. The XSE was still a largely nebulous organization outside the mutant community - it was mostly considered the X-Men with less revealing uniforms - and very few people were that interested in the specifics to wonder why they'd be present at a conference on fluid dynamics. Even fewer would have a curiosity that was more than idle. Besides, Lily and her lab were based in the New Lands and the only surprise would have been if there _hadn't_ been mutant involvement. But at the same time, she more than half expected that Nathan was pulling a collective Jedi mind trick on the room to keep attention away from him. He did that in public sometimes, Scott said.

It was fifteen minutes into her presentation before Lily dared to look at Joe Perotelli, sitting in the back with Arnaud Maldouf. She didn't want to see any sort of disappointment in her onetime mentor's eyes. She had been speaking without seeing, appearing to make eye contact like all good speakers are supposed to, but in fact not looking at anyone. Finally, she focused on where he was sitting and was surprised to see him hunched over, taking copious notes. Somewhat encouraged, she turned her head casually to find Dagley. Ray Dagley was a man not prone to demonstrating emotion. When Lily had been a grad student, it had driven her crazy - she was never sure whether or not he was disappointed with her or not. So it was here as he sat with the pencil in his hand, poised to write - Lily had never seen the man without pencil and paper and she had never seen him actually use either. 

When she had been practicing, Lily had timed her talk at thirty-four minutes. But she was nervous and had run through the highlighter-ed neon stop signs she had put in her notes and the clock showed twenty-nine minutes and forty-three seconds when she finally stopped. There was a pause that seemed to extend on forever, an interminable moment when Lily was sure her future and the future of chronography hung in the balance, until the applause. It was mostly polite applause and that was really all Lily had been hoping for.

Josephine Rapanato, a pleasantly efficient woman in her fifties, got up and went over to her podium, thanking Lily for the presentation. Josephine wasn't a scientist - she was the administrative assistant to the head of whatever part of the AIAA was in charge of fluid dynamics conferences. She had been doing her job for almost twenty years, however, so Lily expected that she was aware of the nature of the substance of her talk. 

And now came the time for running the gauntlet. Josephine had opened the floor to questions. This was the make-or-break point. In the part of Lily's mind that hadn't been quaking with fear, she had known that the presentation in and of itself wasn't going to be the hard part. She had a pleasantly informal writing and speaking style for a scientist and it was because of that that Joe Perotelli had suggested years ago that she supplement her income writing technical manuals. But the questions... this was where everyone could strike back, pretty much without fear of reprisal.

The first person Josephine chose was an unfamiliar face to Lily. He was in his mid-thirties, Lily estimated, and didn't look quite as rumpled as most of the others in the room. He introduced himself as David Robitaille of some Institute that Lily had never heard of and asked a well-laid-out question that basically required Lily to verify that he had heard her correctly. It was a softball question, a fat hanging pitch down the center of the plate - a chance for Lily to reiterate her main points concerning the study of time with respect to the rest of fluid dynamics. Lily had played softball as a child and smacked this pitch over the center-field wall. After she finished answering the question, a good five minutes later, she noticed that quite a few of the hands that had been belligerently raised - anyone who had stood in front of a classroom for any length of time could tell what sort of question was going to be asked by how the hand went up - did not return to the air. 

The next question came from a grad student who had not been able to follow one of the examples Lily had used. From her apparently satisfactory explanation came a follow-up question concerning the range of Reynolds numbers she had so far tested coupled with a request to elaborate on the methods used to derive one of the constants Lily had come up with. The answer to the former was harder than the latter - she was still fiddling with the parameters for how high a number she could use and still be happy with her margin of error. The room laughed in appreciation as Lily explained that the constant had been derived when, in utter frustration, she had followed a certain professor's advice and asked 'What would Fourier do?' and tried to bastardize the seemingly unrelated concepts behind heat flow through a rod. Arnaud Maldouf was beaming when Lily looked over to him.

There were three more questions, one technically related, one asking about the origins of her study (Lily and Nathan having had already manufactured a story, the answer wasn't so hard), and the last regarding what Lily thought the philosophy of technology might have to say about her new area. 

Josephine announced that the next question would be the last and then chose Gita Purniman-Grantham, distinguished professor at the University of New Delhi. Lily knew her from a brilliant paper she had introduced at a conference back when Lily was just deciding to go into fluid dynamics. It had questioned the results of a then-recently-established theory concerning subsonic flow and had sparked a debate that had ended with a schism in the field that had not quite mended itself fifteen years later. Professor Purniman-Grantham had emerged from the debate with a reputation as fearless and skeptical and Lily, who had idolized her earlier on in her studies, was not sure that she wanted to run up against her right now. 

"Doctor Summers," Professor Purniman-Grantham said in her Oxford Standard English as she stood up. She was a petite woman who dressed in traditional Indian costume, although the brighter colored saris of her youth had been exchanged for more muted and elegant patterns. "You have come to us bearing a most unusual gift. What you are presenting to us is, in the truest sense, fantastical. You have used not only new methods, but also new instruments. And yet it comes cloaked in the terms and ideals that we all take as our bedrock and our foundations. Your conclusions are unquestionable rather than unimpeachable because we are all so unfamiliar with your data. You are not asking us to verify, Doctor Summers. My question is what it is you _are_ asking us to do?"

"The short answer, Professor, is that I am asking you all to have faith. Have faith that what I have shown you today is fantastic, but not fantasy. The long answer? Open your minds. This sounds crazy now, I know it does. But twenty years ago, so did a lot of what we teach our undergrads. The last five years have been nothing if not endless supplies of evidence that the world we grew up in doesn't exist anymore. We live in a world where people can fly. Things are different now and it only makes sense that our science is as well."

Lily hoped she looked more confident and less hopeful that people would buy her rhetoric. Professor Purniman-Grantham grimaced lightly, but sat down with a slight nod to Josephine, who began her closing comments and invited the audience to applaud. Lily was too relieved to notice whether it was enthusiastic or polite. She smiled tightly and made sure she didn't stumble as she returned to her seat. She was the only speaker who didn't have a place on the dais - it had been an intentional move, Lily suspected.

"Well?" She asked Nathan, sitting down carefully and putting her notes into the plastic folder she had brought. 

"Within the range of acceptable results," he replied, not looking at her. The conference moderator was making his end-of-session remarks before the group broke for lunch. 

"Don't drown me in any warm fuzzies," Lily retorted, a little put out that he was being so... Nathan-like. As soon as the session formally, ended, Lily got up, grabbed her things, and headed towards the door. Nathan would wait until the crush was past because of his physical infirmity and the difficulty of jostling crowds. Lily herself didn't mind getting caught up in the bottleneck by the door. It allowed her to get a good look at people's reaction to her - who murmured 'nice presentation' and who refused to make eye contact. To Lily's relief, it was more the former than the latter, although a few of the compliments were obviously empty in their sentiments.

This being a scientific conference, the queue for the ladies' room was minimal and Lily managed to keep her amusement to herself as she found herself washing her hands in the sink next to Professor Purniman-Grantham. They smiled politely at each other and reached for separate paper towel dispensers. 

"That was a very interesting talk you gave," Professor Purniman-Grantham said as Lily held the door open for the both of them. "You are very brave for taking such new research public so early on."

"Were the decision solely up to me," Lily replied with a smile, relieved at the non-confrontational tone. "I'd have waited another year, or at least another six months. But I'm... I'd like to call it being cautious."

"This from a woman who chased Pete Yiannakis across the pages of the JFD for the better part of a year," Professor Purniman-Grantham snorted delicately as they made their way down the hall to the foyer where people were congregating. "If this is what you consider cautious, then I would love to see what you would call reckless."

Lily smiled and tucked a loose lock of hair behind her ear. 

"If it is possible, I would like to see a fuller treatment of your Poisson-Stokes derivations," the elder woman went on, smiling and waving at someone Lily didn't dare look up to see. "Amusing as the anecdote was, I suspect there was more than pure frustration that led you to co-opt ideas from Fourier's equations."

"I'll try to put something together as soon as I get back to the New Lands," Lily promised, her smile broadening from shy to exultant. To have Purniman-Grantham on her side... 

"I look forward to it," the professor replied, nodding farewell as they parted at the entrance to the reception room. A buffet lunch was spread out and Lily could see Nathan standing by the table with the chafing dishes. She didn't head over there right away - it wasn't like she didn't know where he was going to be later on - and instead went to go look for Dagley. 

"And here's my little heretic," Ray Dagley said with a beaming smile as Lily approached. He had been talking to a small group of people, but he held out an arm in greeting and gave Lily a warm embrace. Dagley wasn't a man for showing his cards, but Lily hadn't spent all that time at his beck and call during her apprenticeship to not be able to pick up on the cues. Unless she had completely horrified him, Dagley would have greeted her cheerfully. But the warmth of his smile and the quick hug were unspoken proofs of his approval and they heartened Lily greatly, even more so than the interest of Gita Purniman-Grantham. Dagley was perhaps less of a mentor to her than Joe Perotelli, whom she still had to find before the next session began, but that was as much her fault as anything else. Dagley wasn't unfriendly, far from it, but he could be intimidating. Just looking at the crowd surrounding him was evidence why: there wasn't a single person anyone in the room couldn't identify by sight. It had been a mighty shadow to poke out from behind back when Lily had been a graduate student and it would be years before Lily even considered herself worthy to make a comparison. 

At Dagley's encouragement, Lily stayed and chatted with the quintet. They were as curious about her work as they were about the New Lands in general and the lab group she headed up in particular. None of the five had been candidates for the position ("A young person's job," Roy Eberstein had commented wryly, "Innovation is for the under-forty. Verification and amelioration is never out of fashion. You dig it up, we polish it off.") But that didn't stop their interest. Lily got a big laugh from the group by explaining the latest Climate Referendum - Biosphere Five wanted to adopt a more Mediterranean climate.

Checking her watch and seeing that there were fifteen minutes until the next session began, Lily made her apologies to Dagley and the group, promised to see her former advisor before the end of the conference, and went off to the sandwich table. With the aplomb of a graduate student, she loaded down her plate with food and was prepared to retire to a corner where she could scarf the messiest of the salads before she had to carry her plate into the auditorium to sit in the back and eat quietly. 

"Doctor Summers?" 

Lily swallowed the macaroni salad she had shoveled into her mouth and dabbed at her lips, hoping she didn't look too graceless. While it had once been a mildly irrational pet peeve that Alex would tease her mercilessly about, she had gotten remarkably unembarrassed at being caught eating ever since Dane. She had gotten a lot less embarrassed about a lot of things done in public once she had become the proud owner of a two-year-old.  "Yes?"

"Hi, I'm David Robitaille," the man introduced himself, holding his hand out and then pulling it back and waving instead after realizing that Lily had no free hands. She recognized him as the man who had asked the first question after her presentation. "A fascinating talk back there. Nathan said you'd be good, but I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised at how good."

Lily put her fork on her plate and frowned. "Nathan said?" She asked, looking around for the nephew in question. Perhaps there was more set-up to her success at this conference than a couple of Jedi mind tricks and a well-timed lunch break. She really didn't want to think about that just yet. At least not without Nathan in range to be throttled.

"I think he's gone to the Little Askani'Son's room," David said, smiling as she looked at him sharply. "I should tell you before he gets back, by the way, that I've been a fan of your work since Akkaba."

Lily wondered whether she could attribute her hesitance to reply to the paranoia she must have surely picked up by becoming part of the Summers family. Either way, she smiled politely and put out a mental call for Nathan and picked up her fork.

"Ah, I see you two have met," Nathan rumbled as he appeared a moment later. Lily managed not to tip over her plate in surprise; if he had been in the bathroom, he must have teleported back. "Lily, this is David Robitaille. He was my section chief for Australia until a few years ago."

"How do you do," Lily said to him and smiled unapologetically, nodding a greeting. "And thank you. You're not XSE, then, I take it?"

"Oh, no," David replied, holding up his hands in a gesture of warding off danger, "I've put in my time with the army and now I'm out. I've got a civil engineering firm in Sydney now."

Lily, mouth full, nodded. There hadn't been any reason for her to know the details of the merging of Nathan's former network and the X-Men into what had become the XSE, but considering the size of the new organization and the number of personnel that had been around even after Akkaba and it stood to reason that there had been just as much attrition on the network side as there had been among the X-types. 

"I've gotten a bit interested in... I guess you'd say chronography in general... since Akkaba," David went on. "I saw some of your reports in the matter of course for the post-battle cleanup and got intrigued."

"It wasn't all me," Lily demurred, eyeing the clock and realizing that she'd have to wrap up her sandwich and sneak it into the auditorium. 

"No, " David agreed. "But you were the one who kept stepping on the toes of that witch Fakliatore." 

He wasn't Australian, Lily could tell. Probably Canadian with that name and the slight accent. But he had obviously picked up some of the openness of Australians in his time there. He gestured grandly with his hands and did not school his features to stillness. It was all very charming.

Josephine Rapanato clapped her hands loudly by the auditorium door and announced that there were five minutes left. Lily headed back toward the buffet table, took one last bite of potato salad, and put her sandwich section into a napkin before dumping the plate in the trash. She picked up a can of Diet Pepsi, put it in her bag, and headed back to David and Nathan and the three of them entered the auditorium. With a telekinetically-aided lightness of step, Nathan followed her and David up to the rear of the seating section. Lily fully expected Nathan to meditate for the balance of the session, or accomplish some telepathic paperwork or something or other that didn't involve paying attention to Gong Xiu Li attempt to explain something about Prandtl numbers in his extremely fractured English. 

Settled between David and Nathan, Lily at her sandwich discreetly. She was rewarded with a put-upon glare when she held out the soda can to Nathan, who nonetheless opened it up silently. She pulled a blue plastic crazy-straw out of her bag (Dane wouldn't mind her borrowing it) and sat back, finally opening up her notebook. Looking up, she noticed David watching her with bemusement. He gestured at the straw, made an approving face and gave her a thumbs-up. 

"I have a toddler," she whispered, leaning back to get closer. "I'm just happy I remembered to take out the stuff that makes noise."

The second session ended at four-thirty and Lily was aching to get up and stretch her legs when it was over. She had gotten a couple of new ideas for work, but mostly it had been a weird sort of confirmation that she wasn't running in the same circles as most of her Mechanical Engineering brethren anymore. Lily was surprised at the utter lack of... regret. She honestly didn't mind striking out on her own in this regard. There was something remarkably peaceful about not having to look over her shoulder every moment to see who could be co-opting her research.

Nathan was planning on teleporting home - he'd be back to collect Lily tomorrow and bring her to Westchester for a visit with family - and she said goodbye to him after the session, all with the understanding that they'd discuss the events of today in detail then. She strongly suspected David wanted to continue their conversation, but Lily allowed herself to get dragged off to drinks with Joe Perotelli and Arnaud Maldouf and bid him a hasty farewell also. 

Before heading off, however, she ducked into a quiet hallway and called home. Dane was staying with Kyung and Ji-Won (neither of them wanted to say it aloud, but they had been married for almost a year and Lily suspected that they were 'test driving' a baby) and was happy to announce that he hadn't blown anything up. Lily had initially been concerned about leaving Dane behind for three days, but so far it was going well. He had gotten over the worst of his separation anxiety after the first few weeks of daycare and, besides, Kyung and Ji-Won were going to treat him like a visiting dignitary and he knew it.

At the bar, Lily ran into Pete Acolacio, who had been in the ME department with her at Princeton (he did high energy studies) and invited her to dinner with his cohort. The octet who sat down to dinner at the Italian restaurant around the corner from the hotel that evening wasn't as prestigious as the group surrounding Ray Dagley earlier that afternoon. But, as it had gone during lunch, Lily did much of the talking, explaining her work, explaining the New Lands and her lab, and dancing lightly over the rumors that her employers were a holding company for the XSE. This group was younger and had a greater appreciation, Lily thought, for what was possible and she wanted to encourage them without allowing any space for irrational fears.

She finally retired to her hotel room around midnight, having spent way too much time with Pete and Avi Strauss, another Princeton acquaintance, reminiscing about the old days and gossiping. She hadn't known either of the two of them very well when they had been graduate students - well enough to sit down next to them at the coffee bar, and to have had crazy conversations at the same parties they were all invited to through school, but not well enough that she had kept track of them since. Even back in school, her social circle had started to tilt towards Alex's, mostly because he seemed to have more friends at Princeton than she did. But the conversation - and the bourbon - had flowed easily tonight. 

Lily only had planned to attend the morning session of the conference the next day and took the time during the luncheon to say her goodbyes. Dagley made her promise to make a better effort to keep up correspondence with him and Perotelli waggled his finger at her and swore that he would be bombarding her with questions shortly. David was nowhere to be found and Lily was a little surprised to realize that she was disappointed. 

"So," Lily began conversationally as she finished packing her things into her duffel bag. Nathan was sitting in the chair by the window, watching traffic. "How much of the warm reception from the paper was due to you monkeying around with people's heads?"

"I didn't 'monkey'," Nathan denied calmly, not looking up at her. 

"Well, you didn't not do anything at all," Lily replied, folding up the dress she had been wearing yesterday. Wash-and-wear. Another concession to motherhood. "So what did you do to whom? I mean, David Robitaille being here wasn't just a happy coincidence. And Josephine Rapanato calling on him first wasn't a coincidence. And the fact that nobody got up to tell me that I might as well have been reading from a Star Trek novel wasn't a coincidence, either."

Nathan finally turned and Lily paused. His back was straight even as he was leaning on his cane, an elegant bleached wood model, and the afternoon sunlight was streaming in over his shoulder and his eye was gleaming and right then Lily understood why generations of soldiers had followed this man into battle. And then he sneezed. 

"The first two were not coincidence," Nathan admitted as he wiped his nose with a handkerchief. "Although David was fairly jumping at the chance. The last... You did a good job, Lily. You did what you set out to do. What we set out to do. And a little dulling of the impulses of your most virulent opponents isn't going to change that."

Lily laughed in defeat as she zipped up her bag. "You give with one hand and take with the other. Do you know that?"

"I've been told," Nathan replied, standing up a little heavily. "Do you have to go downstairs to check out?"

"Yeah. I'll meet you back up here in five minutes."


	20. June 2010

As she squeezed the steering wheel in frustration as the light turned red, Lily decided that this was worse than it had ever been with Alex. Even perhaps worse than Akkaba.  

["Doctor Summers?  This is Stephanie Bergman from the Septime Early Childhood Center... There's been an accident."]

Alex had gotten hurt with a frequency that only really registered in hindsight, Lily mused as she waited for the damned light to turn. The X-Men-related stuff had usually been healed by Dana before Lily could see it and was only confessed if someone else had warned her in advance. The hazards of the job of a field geologist were less frequent, but came with no mutant healers. To Lily's frustration, Alex had had the nasty habit of surprising her with his injuries. He'd call her from the road without mentioning anything and then come in the door on crutches, like the time he had badly sprained his ankle after a mudslide in Peru. Or he'd try to distract her from discovery of bruises or cuts, say by suggesting they make love in the dark. It had been a game, almost, at least until Akkaba.

Gunning the accelerator and nearly rear-ending the Kia in front of her, Lily signaled and turned right, noticing for the first time that near each stop sign and traffic light along the route had been the international sign for 'hospital' and then an arrow. It was as if the very land itself was mocking her. 

But Alex had been a grown man when he had gotten hurt and, in the end, as scared as Lily had been for him, she had also known that he had been able to take care of himself. That he would not be scared. The same could not be said for their son.

["It happened in the lavatory... Roger said there was a ball of white energy about the size of a beach ball... He was bleeding from the forehead, but, well, there was a lot of blood. I don't know if there were any other wounds... Hope General."]

There was ample parking at the hospital and Lily swung the Subaru into a spot as close to the Emergency Room entrance as she could get. Hope General was the closest hospital to the daycare center, but it was not a hospital that received severe cases by ambulance and therefore wasn't very busy. 

"Hi. My son was just brought in? Last name is Summers," Lily began as soon as she was within range of the triage desk. 

"One of the daycare kids?" The nurse, a portly black woman with a pristine white uniform, asked without looking up. She typed in the name in the computer. "May I see some identification please?"

Lily sighed with frustration at the delay even as she understood it. There had been an anti-mutant bombing back in August of three clinics up in Berlin and the New Lands government had taken precautions. She held up the lab ID that she still wore on a chain around her neck. 

"Daniel?" the nurse asked, nodding that Lily had proven her identity. "He's in the Peds ER room six. The other parents are already here and the teacher who came with them should be done filling out the accident reports by now."

Lily muttered thanks and burst through the doors, pausing once through to orient herself. Even numbers on the left and odd numbers on the right and she could hear Dane screaming in pain even before she pushed open the door across from the nurse's station. 

Dane had gotten himself hurt before. He had received the usual sorts of bumps learning to walk, plus there had been incidents where his electrokinesis had accidentally destroyed something. But he had always been lucky with those - there had never been any glass wounds from the exploding light bulbs that Dane seemed to specialize in and he had only gotten a bruise on his arm from when he had fallen off the kitchen table he shouldn't have been on in the first place after he had done irreparable damage to the toaster oven.

"Mommy!" Dane wailed as she entered and Lily felt her lungs squeeze. Dane's clothes were bloody, his hair was bloody, there were tears streaming down his face and he was trying to escape the grip of the nurse and doctor who were attempting to tend to him. "Mommy!"

Lily caught the slight nod from the doctor who pushed back on his stool as if acknowledging that nothing was going to get done until the patient was mollified. She hurried to her son, who tried to bury his face in her chest and throw his tiny arms around her. He was weeping uncontrollably and Lily tried to soothe him, running her fingers through the back of his hair, where it wasn't matted with blood and rubbing his back. Looking down, she could see that there was a gash across Dane's right temple, an ugly, open, jagged wound that seemed to stop just short of his hairline and caught the top of his eyebrow. The nurse reached over and tried to swab away the blood still flowing. 

"We really do need to stitch that up right away," he said quietly and Lily nodded to him. She looked over her shoulder to where the doctor... Kalvecky, according to the name pin, was opening the sterile-sealed packs lying on a tray. As per the protocols concerning medical treatment of energy producers, both doctor and nurse were wearing devices that siphoned off and stored the electricity that touching Dane would produce. The ER itself was equipped to handle patients with a wide variety of mutations and could provide most services without significant prep time. Dane's electrokinesis was a consideration, but actually didn't rate highly on the scale of difficulty to work around.

Taking a deep breath, Lily rubbed Dane's cheek with the back of her hand. "Are you ready to let the doctor care of you now?" she asked in what she hoped was a cheerful voice. Or at least a not-terrified voice. 

Dane shook his head, still burying his face in her belly and gripping at her shirt harder. The nurse was reaching in again to wipe away the blood and Lily closed her eyes, feeling Dane tighten his hold on her as she tried to gently pull him off of her. "We have to do this now, sweetie. The sooner the doctor fixes you up, the sooner it will stop hurting. And then we can go home and take a nice bath and get all cleaned up... Did you eat lunch yet?"

Dane shook his head no, sniffling and looking up at her with eyes that were still streaming tears. "I was bad, Mommy. I was very bad," he choked out between sobs. 

"How were you bad?" Lily asked, moving to the side as far as Dane would let her so that the doctor could pull his stool back in range. She knew what had happened already - all of the boys in his group had been on line to go to the bathroom when Dane had produced a massive energy blast that had destroyed a urinal. In twenty years, this was going to be very funny, but at the moment, it was anything but. 

"I broke the potty," Dane wailed. "It hurt Joey and Patty and Roger. I hurt them."

Lily sighed, feeling helpless and angry and miserable all at once. Helpless that she couldn't make her son's life easier, angry at the genetic twist of fate that had granted him such extraordinary powers before they could be anything but a bane, and miserable that Dane was finally at an age where he understood all too well the cause-and-effect relationship between his powers and the accidents they caused. Dane had seemingly always understood that touching things he wasn't supposed to was a Bad Thing. But now, his appreciation for the pain and damage he could cause was growing acute. 

"Did you mean to do it?" Lily asked him, reaching out to wipe a tear from his left eye with her right thumb. 

"No," Dane replied in a whisper that was close to devolving into sobs once more. He tried to shake his head, but the nurse now had a gentle grip on it and Lily held his hand and tried to keep him making eye contact with her as the doctor moved in.

"Then it was an accident," Lily told him firmly. "Don't move, honey. Let the doctor fix your cut."

"Joey's mommy said I was bad," Dane contradicted, tears welling up. Doctor Kalvecky wiped them away with a gentle hand before continuing to clean the gash. "She yelled at me."

"Well, she was wrong and I'm going to yell at her," Lily told him, feeling a sudden wave of fury crest. How _dare_ she? Joey Huang was a beta-level energy producer and his parents knew damned well what sorts of things happened. All of the kids in Dane's group were either energy producers or absorbers, although Dane was the only alpha in the six-pack. 

Lily's resentment was strong enough to carry her through Dane's heartbreaking cries as his forehead was stitched up - twenty stitches in all. A warm, wet cloth got most of the blood off of his face and some out of his hair, but not all. Doctor Kalvecky joked with Dane as he took off the boy's shirt, checking for additional wounds. But Dane was in no mood for humor. 

"It looks like he threw his arms up to protect his face," Kalvecky explained to Lily as he showed off the abraded backs of Dane's forearms. "I'll clean them off and cover them up now, but you don't need to worry about doing it after today. This is just me being cautious and taking advantage of Daniel's... temporary willingness to follow doctor's orders. Just make sure he keeps his arms clean until everything is nicely scabbed over and there won't be any problems."

Lily nodded, smiling for Dane who was obviously looking to take his cues from her. His crying had petered out most of the way through the stitching as the doctor had finally gotten him to sing along to Old McDonald after a particularly vivid cow impression. A sniffle escaped every once in a while, but Lily suspected Dane had pretty much cried himself out. 

"The energy blast... I'm gathering this isn't the first time?"

"No," Lily agreed with a sigh as the doctor looked over Dane's pants before gesturing for the nurse to hold Dane up so that they could check his legs. "They've been happening pretty much since we started potty training. Best anyone's been able to figure out is that the whole 'holding it in' concept is what's causing them. But this is the first time serious damage has been done."

"You take precautions at home?" Kalvecky asked as he helped Dane refasten his jeans. There were no cuts on his legs. 

"Oh, yeah," Lily breathed out as Dane was permitted to flee to his mother's arms. She leaned up against the table so that she didn't have to bear his weight. Dane was three, too big to be carried and held for very long no matter how much he needed it. "Place is wired with everything and more. He's low voltage at home."

"Has there been any attempt to train Daniel in the use of his powers yet?" The nurse asked, looking up from the folder. "It says here that his father is an alpha-level plasma producer." 

"My husband is... missing," Lily explained, surprised at how uneasily that came out. After almost four years, Lily had explained it often enough. Perhaps it was simply a matter of the moment, standing here with Dane's blood-soaked shirt in her hand and her son trying to bury himself in her side. 

"Missing... ah," the nurse cut himself off, a blush spreading across his pale features as realization set in. "I should have made the connection right away. My apologies."

"Not required," Lily replied with a shake of her head, her attention turning to the doorway where another nurse was now standing. 

"Mrs. Summers?" She asked cautiously. "I'm really sorry to have to do this to you now, but I need you to fill out a few forms..."

"I'll be there in a moment," Lily replied, turning her attention back to the doctor. "Is there anything else you need to do?"

"We already checked for concussion," Kalvecky replied, standing up and walking over to a cabinet. He pulled out a light blanket and handed it to her. "So you don't have to put his shirt back on."

Lily thanked the doctor as she accepted the blanket, looking down at her own shirt, bloodstained as well, and at the still-clinging Dane. "You ready to go home, kiddo?"

Dane nodded into her chest, turning only when the nurse called his name and offered him a lollipop for being such a good boy. With one hand occupied with the lollipop, Lily was able to pry the other one off of her shirt and wrapped Dane up in the blanket before re-shouldering her purse and picking him up. Thanking the doctor and nurse, Lily went across the hall to the nurse's station and let Dane sit on the counter as she filled out the insurance forms. 

Twenty minutes later, after a quick chat with the teacher who had accompanied the ambulance to the hospital and with a sleepy Dane in her arms (they had given him a mild sedative, it was explained, once they had determined that there was no brain injury), she headed towards the exit. Lily was relieved that the swaddled boy in her arms covered up most of her own mess - it would be disconcerting for the people still in the waiting room to see someone covered in blood. 

As she turned around to back through the doors to the waiting area, Lily saw Joey Huang's mother approaching. Checking to see that Dane was too groggy to appreciate what would probably happen, she steeled herself for the exchange. 

"Don't say a word unless you're coming to apologize to my son," she said as the small woman drew close with obvious anger in her stride and hands balled into fists. "Because otherwise it is going to be very fortunate that we are already in the emergency room. How _dare_ you yell at Dane. How dare you. He's three years old and he can't control himself. You're supposed to be the grown-up, so what is your excuse?"

"He nearly killed my son and three others. He's dangerous."

"He didn't nearly kill anyone," Lily retorted with a snarl. "And he's not nearly as dangerous as I will be if I find out that you've even looked at my son. Trust me on that."

With that, she pushed through the doors, turned, and walked purposefully through the triage area and waiting room. She didn't realize she was shaking with anger until she had put Dane into his car seat. Standing up again, she leaned her hands against the roof of the car and took a deep, jagged breath. The surge of emotion that she knew was coming was starting to eat at her control, so rather than lose it completely in the hospital parking lot, she closed the door, opened her own, and headed home. 

Dane was awake enough to walk into the house and Lily chose to make the most of the opportunity and took him into the bathroom to wash off the rest of the blood. She had to be careful because of the stitches, but managed to get his hair cleaned and toweled him off before Dane got too lethargic to be of any help. She put him down to nap and then took a quick shower herself and changed into casual clothes. As she made tea, she called the lab to let them know that Dane was all right and she was taking the rest of the day off and then she took her tea into the living room and sat down on the couch, the first time she'd allowed herself to still since the phone call that had started off the excitement. 

Every time she thought she was getting a handle on the single-parent thing, something else would come up to remind her of just what sort of an amateur she really was. Orly had joked years ago that Lily was making herself crazy over nothing - if the cavemen could propagate the species without the benefit of parenting magazines and social services, Lily could hardly mess things up too badly. But cavemen had social networks and Lily, as everyone was always eager to remind her, was intent on going it alone. Too intent, sometimes. Checking her watch and doing the mental calculations, Lily picked up the phone. 

"Dad? Hi... Umm...We just got back from the ER. Dane had an accident... Twenty stitches to the forehead and some abrasions. He took out a urinal at daycare... Yeah, I know it's going to be really funny in a little while, but right now I'm not much up for a laugh... Once in three years with his propensity to blow out bulbs is pretty good, but... Four times? What did I do?... What was I doing with a claw hammer?... And you _let_ me?... No, Dad, you're not convincing me that I'm a better parent, but I am gaining insight into my own resilience... Work's crazy right now and I don't know when I can afford the time to make the plans to visit, let alone to execute them... I keep telling you that, but you never take me up on it... Seriously?... Yeah, why not. She'd actually get a kick out of being down here. Lots of folks just like her... All right, just send me an email... Sleeping. They gave him something. I'm not sure how long to leave him. It's almost two here and he hasn't eaten lunch yet and I don't want him being all wired when it's time for him to go to bed... Oh, man, I have to deal with the daycare place. One of the other kids' moms lit into Dane, apparently... Oh, I let her have it. I just don't want it screwing anything up for Dane... Yeah. No, I will. I'm your daughter, remember?... Yeah... All right... I love you, too. Bye."

Lily got up, investigated what was in the fridge for lunch, then swallowed hard and called the daycare center. The supervisor was very supportive, completely understanding, and assured Lily that any problems with other parents would be dealt with swiftly. "Accidents with burgeoning powers, however traumatic they may be at the time, are part of a mutant's learning experience," Nadia Ardikayeva assured her. "And while it is our hope that no one should ever be hurt, it would be contrary to our pedagogical principles to... freak out and overreact when those accidents do happen. We sincerely hope Dane is feeling well enough to return to school tomorrow."

Dane was not terribly happy about being woken up, but Lily didn't want to combine lunch and dinner into one meal for him. His crankiness was overcome by his hunger, however, and a full stomach improved his mood enough that Lily didn't have any problems getting him to sit in his stroller - Dane normally fussed that he wanted to walk - as they went the few blocks to the grocery and then the drug store. Even though Lily treated him to a box of Creamsicles (another moment of nature over nurture; Lily abhorred them and Alex had loved them), Dane was subdued for the entire outing and barely had a wave for Mr. Lee, the green grocer who always had a treat for him. 

They returned home, where Dane forewent his toy cars in favor of leafing through his books - he didn't read per se, but liked the pictures well enough to be entertained. He came into her office and sat on the floor, burbling his own versions of the stories quietly to himself as she checked her email to see what she had missed at work. When she went to start dinner, Dane followed behind into the kitchen and sat on one of the chairs with one of his stuffed animals and chattered at it and her and they sang the alphabet together while she scrubbed potatoes. Lily stopped cutting the carrots when she heard what sounded like a version of that morning's events. She had tried to get the story out of him earlier, during lunch, but he hadn't really wanted to talk about it and Lily had let it go. Now Clyde the Big Red Dog was getting an explanation and Lily felt her eyes tear up as Dane fervently tried to tell the toy that he hadn't meant to make his friends cry and he hoped that they would still be his friends. Lily sincerely hoped so as well. 

Despite her planning, Lily was not especially surprised that Dane wasn't ready to go to sleep at his bedtime. He picked out the fattest book he had to be his story for the night and turned his most devastating puppy-dog look on her when it was over before asking for another story. She told him that the only story left involved subsonic flow and low Reynolds numbers, but Dane didn't cared. So she read to him from the _Journal of Fluid Dynamics_ for half an hour before succeeding in getting him into the bathroom to wash up for bed. 

The next morning, Dane was very torn about returning to 'school.' He was scared that nobody would like him anymore and he was curious about where he would go potty and he hoped that Mrs. Taylor would still let him play with the blocks. Lily was apprehensive on his behalf as well. But Mrs. Taylor was waiting for him and so was three-year-old Patty Schroeder, beta-level energy absorber, who pulled up his shirt to show off the bandage on his stomach but didn't seem to blame Dane for causing it. After Dane disappeared to put his things in his cubby, Lily checked to make sure that his teacher was authorized to give him a pain reliever should he require it. Satisfied, she went off to work and was relieved when nobody at the lab commented about how she jumped every time her phone rang.


	21. October 2010

"I don't give a flying fuck what else Sagerstein has to do today," Lily growled at the man standing before her. "You tell him that he runs the filters I asked for **now**. Not later today, not after he finishes the dailies, but now. Do you understand me?"

This was the first time the Chronography group was actively trying to intercept a major event rather than just sit helplessly and passively as it unfolded around them, waiting for the dust to settle so they could pick through the rubble. Lily was not going to make it a failure because of the bureaucratic fetishes of people who, whether they liked it or not, reported to her.

"Yes, ma'am." Chris Provenzano, a graduate student from Milwaukee who was currently interning with the group's data sorting subsection, nodded quickly. 

"Good," Lily barked. "Now make Sagerstein understand. Go!"

Provenzano fairly sprinted out of the large room, the stunned-silent audience rendering audible his sneakers squeaking on the hallway tile as he banked right to head for the Historical Data Analysis office. 

Chris was a good kid, Lily knew. And he probably would understand later when she'd feel guilty enough to explain that he had simply been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But right now, Lily really didn't have the time to worry about anyone's feelings. Janne Kallio had called her at home at six fifteen in the morning to report that the overnight readings had been alarmingly high. High enough so that Nathan had called her cell phone while she was dropping Dane off at daycare (an hour early) to ask what was going on. Five hours later, Lily still wasn't sure.

Historical Data Analysis, HisDAs, was a world unto itself, one that Lily did not care to visit often. Chock full of the arrogant elitists who had driven her crazy at Akkaba, HisDAs was charged with categorizing every world event on a sliding scale of influence, from floods to assassination attempts to stock market dips to airbag recalls. They were creating a catalog of calamity, cross-referenced by time, place, event, and effect and then rated in units (that Lily really wished to call 'Nathans'). 

The grand plan of the chronography group, after they figured out how to successfully derive a function that would map all of time itself, was to turn that book of disaster into a something that could be concretely applied to fluid dynamics. A one-to-one mapping of real-life event to specific flow-control aspect. Chronography's official aim was to create a mathematically precise prescience, one unhindered by human subjectivity and limitations. But what they had now was at best imprecise and at worst outright guessing and it all came from hindsight and not foresight. Which meant it was useless as a predictive tool. What had worked at Akkaba had done so in a large part because of the localized nature of the battle; everything was happening right there. The rest of the universe was not so obliging. 

Right now, even if they could successfully map a particular distortion effect to, say, an earthquake, it wouldn't do anyone much good because the 'what' -- earthquake -- was all they could reasonably predict, not the where or when or even the magnitude. _That_ was why everyone was so on edge - any sort of large ripple was just a vague harbinger of a doom that might or might not be coming, depending on how well that particular model was extrapolating the flow of time. This was their daily frustration, today magnified because this morning's ripple had been more like a small tsunami.

"Show's over folks," Lily announced as she sat back down at her desk.

The silence lasted for a moment longer before a muted version of office noise - conversations continued at a whisper, furniture moved gently instead of casually - took over. The tension was almost tangible, but everyone also knew that they had work to do. For all of the progress made, chronography was still much more a theoretical mathematical construct than an applied science and today's numbers were just a reminder that they were rapidly running out of time in which to bridge the gap. 

On hundred models running for sixteen months and subject to hourly corrections had gotten the group astonishingly close to being able to map the time stream... As a discontinuous function. With a very small range. And mostly unable to accommodate for extreme variation. And with a tendency to be proven non-convergent. 

"Well, it's good to know that you aren't afraid to pull rank," Amy commented cheerfully as she wheeled into Lily's space and rolled over to the mini conference table. "You've been here more than a year; we were getting worried."

"I pull rank all the time," Lily replied humorlessly as she grabbed the sheaf of papers from her desk and moved over to the table. "It's just usually less theatrical."

Ideally, Lily would have liked to say that she ran the Chronography group as a constitutional monarchy. But that would be misleading. Somewhere between that and enlightened absolutism would probably be closer. Depending on how much crap was hitting the fan at any given moment, of course. 

"First results from the AA: we have sixteen models running at higher than 98%," Miri Ahearn called out from across the room, the din quieting down. "Ten higher than 99%."

Actuality Alignment, the measuring up of mathematically derived projections with what had actually happened, had become ever more precise. When Lily had arrived, anything over eighty percent alignment had been considered a boon. Seven months ago, when she had presented her findings in Lafayette, ninety percent had been the standard. By the time she had taken Dane back to New York for vacation in August, they were discounting any result lower than ninety-five. It was rougher going now and ninety-seven was really the boundary, but if they could find a big enough sample at a higher AA...

"Time frame?" Ubong Wadkins, the chief mathematician of the group hollered back. He had returned from a family wedding in Nigeria two days ago and Lily knew that the jet lag must have been killing him. He was supposed to have been off today. 

"Fortnight."

Ubi made a displeased face and looked at Lily for input. 

"That's halfway between something and nothing," she replied, then raised her voice enough for Miri to hear across the room. "Did you run histories on those models?"

"They're going now," Miri replied, leaning down so that she could hear her partner, Eddie Kim, before standing up again. "Ten minutes for a complete six-month workup."

"I want your best ideas for a workable sample on Santivaldi's screen in half an hour," Lily told her, gesturing with her hand for the runner from HisDAs to give his package to Amy. "Santivaldi, that means I want Wadkins' people to have at least an update within the hour. Ubi, I don't want to hear that you don't know what's going on, okay?"

Lily sat down heavily as everyone's attention shifted to their tasks and the voices of the subgroup leaders' started to be heard. 

"It finally feels like work," Roger Marlowe fairly chirped with grim humor as he entered Lily's cubicle space from the other side that Amy had come in from. He, too, had a tablet computer and a notepad. While their daily dealings were usually too brief to merit Roger either sitting or bringing a pad, today was an exception. "All these mathematicians and theoretical physicists and theoretical fluids people - present company excluded, of course - and I was starting to feel like my engineering skills were withering away and atrophying... Radek's on his way. He was waiting for a call from Dov Himmelman."

Another holdover from Nathan's private army, Roger was the field agent administrator. An electrical engineer by training, he had held a commission with the Royal Marines before entering into the service of the Askani'Son and he used all of those skills to deploy the manpower necessary to gather the sorts of information that a roomful of Crays couldn't. If HisDAs could turn the world into a two-dimensional construct, Roger was the one who worked in 3-D, collecting nuances, rumors, and other sorts of subjective data that often meant as much as the stuff pulled off the newswire. HUMINT and RUMINT, as he liked to call it. It was the more dynamic - and less hidebound - half of the social sciences aspect of chronography. Lily wasn't quite sure how many people Roger supervised - the remnants of the cloak-and-dagger operations that had been par for the course before Akkaba were mostly beyond her ken and she was happy to focus on the results and not on how they were acquired. Nathan trusted Roger and, separately and on her own terms, so did she. 

"Who is Himmelman?" Lily asked. It was probably one of the field chiefs; she could never keep their names straight. 

"South America," Roger answered as he flipped pages on his tablet with finger flicks. "Radek had a hunch about something in Argentina."

Radek Droppa, the very proud elder brother of the Czech Elite League's best goalie, often had hunches. He was a mutant, although his powers were nebulous the way Domino's were - sometimes they worked, sometimes it was hard to tell. His 'hunches' had served him well as a spy first for the Czech government and then for Nathan and now for Roger, whose deputy he was. Lily called them Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, Amy preferred Yin and Yang. They were a well-matched set, Roger and Radek. Roger's skills focused on data flow and his passion lay in finding the latest gadgets that would improve such; Radek had the uncanny ability to assign the operatives armed with those toys to just the right place at just the right time. Roger was Eton and Oxford, Radek was pilsner and the Scorpions, but they worked in perfect harmony. 

Amy snorted. "Watch, he's going to solve this mess before we can get the rest of the results back from Sagerstein." She held up the tablet that the page had brought her to show its screen. Lily couldn't see the numbers from where she was. "We are so going to have to refine how Meteorology assesses things after this is over. I grew up in Baltimore and I have a better handle on how to weigh a snowstorm than they do. It's in effing Oslo, not Los Angeles. The Norwegians can handle a meter of snow."

"They are Norwegians," Radek sniffed as he sat down, dropping a pile of flash drives on the desk. "They have nothing to do but play in the snow."

"How is Argentina?" Lily asked, pulling her chair closer to the table. With her favorite unholy trio assembled, they could now set down to work. 

"Dead end," Radek frowned, his bangs falling into his eyes. "I still think it's going to be political, but... General Locatelli has a firmer grip on the Parliament than it looks, so..."

"But why Argentina in the first place?" Amy asked, not unkindly. Amy, like Lily, did not have the appreciation for the subtlety of international politics that Radek did. "With the numbers we've been getting, I'd think it would be a first-world country, not..." she trailed off, waving the pencil in her hand vaguely. 

"Think keystones," Roger explained, steepling his fingers and then tapping his index fingers together. "You take out the right little rock and everything else comes crashing down."

The quartet started working in earnest then, running through folders of past events and parsing through the reports generated by the group members. A half-hour later, the computer on Lily's desk started beeping. 

Lily got up and went over to the monitor. She skimmed the contents of her screen before bouncing the file over to the monitor screen by the table. The graphs were plotted on very few points - it was an early version - but Lily felt a little surge of... not pride, but at least confidence that she had chosen the right filters. The Concussed Cassandra, they had taken to calling themselves here. Mindful of their search to predict the truth, the Chronography group hadn't lost its sense of humor. The annual picnic had come complete with t-shirts that had 'Next Stop: Delphi' on the backs. 

She rejoined the trio as Amy traced one of the graphs with the eraser end of her pencil. 

"Take a look at this," Lily told the trio. "It's the rough version of the last thirty-six hours corrected for incidence by Sagerstein. Roger, I think keystones are exactly what we're looking at."

"The amplitude and frequency are all wrong for a major disaster," Amy mused just loud enough to be heard. Squinting to see the numbers, Amy jotted down an equation and started working through it, turning her notepad around to show Lily and Roger. Radek, cheerfully unmathematical in nature, just watched. "If we ran this all the way through, the increase is going to be geometrical. We're not looking at a Class Five hurricane or a nuclear attack. We're looking at a relatively small event with big consequences."

"And we're going to have to wait a little bit to see what sort of consequences and what sort of event we have," Lily agreed with a sigh. "Not to mention a better clue as to _when_ this is going to happen."

Roger checked his watch. "I have a video conference scheduled in ten minutes. If we've graduated to the stage where we are waiting for new information before plotting our next move, then perhaps I might beg permission to run off for a bit?"

Lily nodded. "Go ahead. We'll reconvene later, once some more of the grunt work has been done and processed. I should call Nathan and give him an update anyway. I'm surprised he hasn't teleported here yet to ask questions in person."

Roger stood and bowed slightly before departing, Radek trailing behind. Lily turned to Amy. "We should take a look at the run-of-the-mill stuff that's been otherwise ignored today."

"And you need to call your parents," Amy reminded her as she wheeled herself back towards her cubicle. "I'll come back in a few with the rundown on the non-emergency stuff."

Lily sighed. The timing couldn't be worse. Her parents were due in for their first visit to the New Lands and she was tied up at work. She looked at her watch, figuring out what time it would be in California. Her father would already be en route to Los Angeles, but her mother would probably still be in San Francisco. 

"Hey, Mom?... Just checking to make sure everything's okay... He did? Good...A little hectic, actually, but I'm hoping things will be done by the time you get here... No, I'll try and explain once I see you... Don't forget your immunization papers... No, they'll have them in the computer, but it will make getting through Customs twice as long... Remember when you went to Hawaii? Same thing... He's excited... Yeah... All right, let me get back to work. I'll see you in two days... Yeah. Love you, too."

* * *

A long time ago, during one of the many bouts of 'if I don't get out of here, there's going to be a homicide' that had plagued her teenaged years, Lily had gotten fed up and fled. She hadn't run that far - from San Francisco up to Portland - and it had only been to her Aunt Eleanor's. Eleanor had spent hours explaining to a bitter fifteen-year-old that Star wasn't _trying_ to make her miserable, that she was in fact trying her hardest to make her happy. Lily, of course, had been unmoved. But one thing from that long talk had stayed in her skull seventeen years later: 'you'll understand when you have kids.' At the time, Lily had sworn on her honor that that would never happen and she would never bring a child into the world if she could help it. But now, as she watched her normally quiet son prattle on nonstop to his grandmother about anything and everything that was going on in his life, Lily knew that Eleanor had been right. 

Things were not great between her and her mother, but Lily would readily admit that they were a far cry from how they had been. Becoming a parent in her own right had given Lily an embarrassingly fresh perspective on her own upbringing. And while there was still plenty that Lily just couldn't bring herself to accept - say, the commune - Lily was a lot more... forgiving than she had been. Certainly much more willing to let grudges lie when it came to dealing with the future, namely Dane. 

"This is some place you got here," her father mused, looking around as they walked through the park. 

"Just wait until we get to some of the other bubbles this weekend," Lily replied with a smile. She had picked them up at the airport around noon, picked up Dane from daycare, and brought everyone home for lunch and naps before heading back to work. She had originally planned on taking the afternoon off - and a couple of days if she could swing it. But even after two days of nearly constant effort, Lily couldn't abandon her team. She had even felt guilty about leaving work only two hours later than normal.

The upcoming 'event' had been amazingly difficult to pin down, even within the normal boundaries of unknowns. There had been a persistent anomaly; five of the twenty-eight models culled as being the most accurate were showing the same divergence. The other twenty-three were showing similar results, all of them ranging from bad to worse in terms of how they affected the flow. It had been incredibly frustrating to watch twenty-eight versions of the future and not be able to shake the strong sense of foreboding and helplessness. 

"Your head is elsewhere," Daniel noted even as he smiled. Dane was dragging Star towards a flower garden because he wanted her to see the bugs. "Is work that bad?"

Lily sighed. "Yes and no. In general, it's great. It's still a dream job. But right now... We are on the cusp of opening up a tremendous... power, I guess. An awesome ability. But it's just out of reach, no matter what we do. And we know enough right now to appreciate just how powerful it is and how helpless we are... Is this making any sense?"

Daniel nodded as they headed off the path to follow Dane and Star. Star was identifying flowers for her grandson.

"We have two clairvoyants on the team," Lily went on, digging a tissue out of her bag. Dane was still on the tail end of a cold and his nose was running. "They understand the frustration. The rest of us are just going slowly mad... Hey, Junior, come here for a second."

Dane, of course, knew what was up and hid behind his grandmother. 

"Don't wipe your nose on Grandma's skirt," Daniel called with a laugh. Star looked surprised for a second, then turned around and looked down. Dane looked up at her innocently and sniffled. And then he started to run. 

"Let me," Daniel offered, taking the tissue out of Lily's hand and jogging after his grandson. Dane hadn't even made it as far as the path before he was scooped up. "Freeze, Buster. This is the snot patrol!"

"He's getting so big," Star said as she walked over to where Dane was losing the battle to his grandfather. Lily nodded, comfortable but wary because her mom had the look of someone about to start a real conversation. She hadn't really gotten a chance to talk to her parents since they had gotten in - the novelty of the New Lands had been overwhelming, as it was prone to be, and she had mostly been explaining and pointing out. "And he really looks happy."

"He's free here," Lily replied with a shrug that wasn't nearly as casual as it looked. "His friends are similarly powered, or at least complementary in powers, and the public facilities are built with a whole host of mutant abilities in mind. He doesn't have to be so cautious. Exploding toilets notwithstanding."

Star nodded, then looked thoughtful. "And you? I never ask because I don't want you snapping at me that it's none of my business..."

"I'm okay," Lily answered, accepting the guilt that went with that statement. 

"Are you seeing anyone?"

Lily closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She had really hoped that her mother wouldn't head in this direction so quickly upon arriving. "I'm still married, Mom. Alex's presence or absence doesn't change that."

"It's been almost four years..."

Her hands were in her pockets, so Lily knew that Star couldn't see them stretch and ball into tight fists. 

"Mom, please. I don't want to get into this. Not here, not now." And not with you, she added silently. If there was one issue between herself and her mother that parenthood had not smoothed the jagged edges of, it was her parents' divorce. 

"I just want you to be happy..."

It took all of Lily's willpower not to tell her mother that just because Star didn't have the personal fortitude to stick it out didn't mean that Lily thought it was okay to follow suit. "I have my son, my work, and my friends and family. That's good enough to make do."

"Mommy!" Dane came running up to her, shattering the tension like a hammer on glass. "I read the sign to Grampa!" 

"That's great, kiddo," she told him. Dane could handle small words, although he was getting remarkably adept at sounding out the longer ones. They read together daily, be it one of his books or one of hers. 

"All of it? All by yourself?" Star asked, her attention focused solely on her grandson.

Dane looked mildly embarrassed. "I needed help on the big word. But I got everything else."

"My little genius," Lily said, crouching down and kissing his forehead. She looked up at her father, who had rejoined them. "You think you can read Grandma and Grandpa your bedtime story?"

Dane looked excited by the prospect for a moment before realization set in. "It's bedtime?"

He was a dangerous pouter. Three and a half and he could make his lower lip quiver like a pro, his blue eyes mournful and hopeful all at once. Fortunately, Lily had proven as immune to this ability as she had to his mutant one. 

"Close enough, kiddo. You have to take a bath, too."

"But..." 

"But Grandma and Grandpa aren't going anywhere for a while. You'll see them tomorrow and the day after and the day after."

Dane didn't look mollified, but he didn't look like he was going to throw a temper tantrum either, so Lily stood up. She held out her hand for him to take, but so did Star and Dane went with her instead. 

"Fickle child," she told him without rancor.

Lily answered questions from her father about local politics and geography on the walk home and it took a good fifteen minutes of dithering to finally get Dane into the bath. Once there, he was his usual happy self. He had a new bath toy, a lovingly detailed plastic miniature of the *USS Sanford**, which just happened to be the destroyer his grandfather had commanded for two years. And said grandfather was more than happy to exchange information on the ship in return for Dane's cooperation in getting clean. 

Lily was making tea when a pajamaed Dane padded in to the kitchen to say goodnight. He was going to read his story with Grandma, if that was okay with her. Lily assured him that her feelings weren't hurt and he kissed her and ran off. 

"I was kind of hoping that my role as peacemaker had been gracefully retired," Daniel began quietly as he came into the kitchen. Lily looked up from where she was refilling the sugar bowl. She didn't take sugar in her tea, but her mother did. 

She sighed audibly. "Can we just skip quietly past the part where you remind me that she only wants what's best for me and go straight into where I promise to be on my best behavior?"

"I know you don't want to talk about it," Daniel replied, sitting down. "And neither does your mother. But being as I'm going to be the one stuck in the middle, I should think I get a vote in the matter."

"Majority rules?" Lily asked hopefully, pouring tea for the both of them. "It's... We're getting better. We really are. And I know Mom knows we have to do it step-by-step. But she chooses the most _irritating_ steps sometimes."

"Irritating being anything that doesn't have to do with Dane, you mean?"

Lily frowned at her father, who looked back mildly. 

"I'm still working on her being my mother," she finally said. "I'm not ready for her to be my friend."

"Lily..."

"Dad, she asked me if I was dating anyone," she interrupted, setting down her teacup. "Even in some weird universe where I would talk to my mother about my love life, considering she knows how I feel about her own choices, I can't imagine why she would think that was appropriate."

It was her father's turn to sigh. He leaned back in his chair and picked up his teacup. 

"She's not the only person in my life who thinks I shouldn't be waiting for Alex anymore. But I don't listen to them and I'm not going to listen to her. It's my decision. And if I ever choose to change my mind on the matter, it won't be because she or anyone else thinks it's a good idea."

Daniel took a sip of tea and put down his cup. "I'll talk to her. But I'm also going to remind you for the millionth time that it's not your place to feel resentful towards her for what happened between her and me. I appreciate your loyalty, but I haven't spent all this time in the Navy to have my daughter fight my battles for me. Especially when there is no battle to fight."

Lily nodded, chastened but at the same time unrepentant. And not at all under the impression that her father missed her reaction. 

From the other end of the house, they could hear Dane's laughter.

"Your mother and I are both sorry that we weren't able to provide a more stable environment for you to grow up in," he went on. "But you're a mother yourself now and you're in your own situation. How would you feel if in twenty years, Dane had a grudge against Alex for not being here now?"

"But it's different..."

"No it isn't. As a parent, we all make choices based on what's best for our child. Alex did it, your mother did it, I did it. Don't be angry with her for the choices she made and don't make your own choices just to spite her. You're a better person than that."

* * *

The phone rang at four-twenty in the morning. Normally, Lily would have left the machine to screen the call, but with her parents sleeping and the mess at work... 

Fifteen minutes later, Lily was surprised to see her father leaning against the wall, watching her put on her shoes. 

"What happened?" 

"A bomb went off in Genosha," she replied, standing up. She hadn't bothered to shower, just thrown on jeans and a shirt and pull her hair into a ponytail. "Right in the middle of a joint parliamentary session. Two hundred dead so far. The Minister for the Exterior was on a state visit to India at the time. He's seeking asylum in Great Britain."

"Terrorists?" Her father had shifted posture at the word 'bomb' and he tilted his head thoughtfully. "There's supposed to be a UN conference there next month..."

"Coup."

"Jesus," Daniel hissed and Lily was reminded yet again that her father had spent significant time there cleaning things up after the last bout of political unrest. He followed her to the front closet and leaned against the opposite wall. "Is this what you were trying to prevent at work?"

"Prevent? That won't happen for a while," Lily laughed humorlessly as she reached for her coat. "We had a dim hope of _predicting_ it. We did, almost. We knew it was political and we were pretty sure it was going to be a big thing in a small country rather than a small thing in a big country. Wiping out the Genoshan government by itself shouldn't have been enough to set off the alarms that it did. There's got to be something more going on. I'm hoping to be back in time to take Dane to daycare..."

"We can watch him. He doesn't have to go."

"He likes it. I was going to put him there in the mornings while you guys were here, give you two a break and let you do your own exploring. I'll call you once I get a clue what's going on."

"Okay." Daniel kissed her cheek and let her leave. 

Scott called her cell phone as she was driving to the lab and she had him call her back on her work line. The 'something else' was that the coup had been undertaken by a group led by the former Magistrates. The first act of the revolutionary government was to require that all mutants register at the local police stations within twenty-four hours or risk being shot on sight. 

It was sort of like Akkaba, Lily idly noted as she cornered Miri Ahearn and Eddie Kim to find out what sort of resampling was being done because the mesh they had generated was now utterly useless. Localized warfare. The simple moves of battle had been 'viewable' in the time stream for years. Half of the group in the room now had been with her at Akkaba as well, albeit mostly in different roles, and they were familiar with the speed and the means this sort of task required. 

Nathan appeared around eight-thirty New Lands time, looking haggard. He had brought Sam Guthrie, leaving Bishop and Scott to run things in Westchester. The two of them set up shop at Lily's conference table, staying out of the way for the most part as Lily ran the show. Their very presence, dressed in the dark uniform of the XSE and hunched over the table deep in concentration, was probably slightly daunting to the less experienced of the lab group, but Lily did not find them disruptive. 

By eleven, she was confident in telling Nathan that unless the Magistrates were taken out of power quickly, things would devolve out of control. Even the early-stage projections were looking bleak. She knew he knew this already, being tied so intimately to the time stream as he was, but she also knew that he needed some more solid evidence than simply his own migraine. This was going to be the XSE's first time out taking on a sovereign nation, even if the governing powers themselves were illegal, and they needed all of the evidentiary support that could be mustered. Nathan cursed quietly and bitterly about the need to justify actions that were self-evident to anyone with the common sense of a five-year-old, but Lily knew he had already come to terms with the politics of the XSE. The UN was terrified of the XSE even as they sanctioned their activities and several nations were nothing short of outspoken in their posturing. Chronographic evidence was not nearly on the level as, say, a signed manifesto by the illegal government of Genosha, but it was less nebulous than still-distrusted mutant foreboding.

By noon, Magnus Lehnsherr had joined Sam and Nathan at Lily's table. While the presence of the XSE was almost expected, many staffers had turned and stared as the President of the New Lands had walked purposely through the large office and sat down as if he were just another part of the team, standing up and moving aside as Amy Dominguez wheeled into the area to discuss the latest filter results appearing on the conference monitor. Magnus looked both haunted and defiant, Lily thought. Haunted by his past both with Genosha and in the Holocaust and by the what-ifs that came along with this sort of situation. But he was also defiant in his determination to fight back. The New Lands had no national airline, but a large passenger jet had been chartered to fly to Genosha and bring back anyone who wanted to escape. The New Lands had automatic citizenship for mutants and there would be a special session of the Council in the later afternoon to discuss handling refugees. It had been only a few years since Magnus had reintroduced himself to the world not as a terrorist but instead as a concerned leader of a nation, but it was already hard to see Magneto in the face of the man at her desk and Lily honestly empathized with his pain.

By three, most of the commotion had died down. Sam and Nathan had gone back to the government offices with Magnus and most of the grunt work that had to be done had been done. Exhausted herself, Lily released any staffers who were not actively working on anything. She finally headed home herself around six after first stopping by the Presidential Residence to personally deliver a rough draft of the report on the group's findings. She'd redraft it tomorrow, even though Magnus had told her that he doubted it would be needed before Friday. 

Once home, she took a shower and tried to shift her focus from work to her family. But she couldn't. The Genosha her father had helped clean up and the Genosha that had undone all of that work were not the same and neither was she. Lily had been in her teens when the mutates had been freed. Now she was the mother and wife of mutants. Alex had never wanted to talk about Genosha, even more than he had avoided talking about Dallas. Lily was partly curious what Alex would have thought about this moment in history, but she was mostly glad that he didn't know about it. She could see him calling in favors of all sorts to get down there and help out with a resistance movement. 

Her parents seemed to be feeling the weight of events as well and dinner was a subdued affair. Lily wanted to talk to them - she was used to mutants in the family, but this was really the first time that they had had such a personal fear of the persecution of someone they loved. Alex was Alex, but Dane was their grandson and Lily was sure that the news had been showing footage of pre-Liberation Genosha with the branded mutates in their bodysuits. But she wasn't sure what to tell them, what to say that wouldn't seem preachy or false. 

Dane, blissful in his ignorance, tried his best to cheer everyone up by demonstrating his alphabet skills. Lily was too tired to stay up much past his bedtime - she had to go into work early the following day as well. 

* * *

Lily started when the phone rang. Even in the cacophony of the office, she had been deep enough into her own work that the noise had startled her.

"Summers," she answered.

It had been two weeks since the bomb had gone off in Genosha's Parliament. Two hundred forty-three dead and eighty-nine wounded in the blast. At least fourteen dead and unknown (meaning too many to count) wounded and missing in the aftermath of the Magistrates' takeover. 

"You know, considering that this is an XSE op, that has to be the least specific identifier you could have chosen."

The negotiations had been sharp and short. Fifty-three hours into talks, the Magistrates had carried out the public execution of Jennifer Ransom, heroine of the Liberation and current Minister for the Interior. Thirty-two minutes later, transport planes carrying two hundred XSE troops took off from an airfield in Dar es Salaam. The first four days of fighting had been complicated by the Magistrates using a telepath to incite civilians to battle the XSE troops; the surrender had taken place on the sixth day, yesterday. 

"Hey, David," Lily greeted him warmly. "What's the word?"

David Robitaille, amateur chronographer and professional civil engineer, had had his retirement from Nathan's network abruptly ended four hours after the explosion in Genosha, when a phone call from his sister's home in Hammer Bay had informed him that Nathalie Robitaille Goneau had not returned home from her job at the Canadian Embassy. He had been working intelligence since then, which in turn had brought him into daily phone contact with Lily. 

"The word is that my sister is back home with her husband and children, suffering from no more than a bad hair day and torn stockings," he replied, sounding relieved. "We found the Canadians locked up with the Russians and the French. Take that as you will."

"That's great," she enthused, dropping the smile so that she could stand up and glare at Eddie Kim, who had been parked on the edge of Annie 'the Body' Herskovitz's desk for the last fifteen minutes in his latest attempt to chat up the stunning physicist. Eddie didn't notice, but Annie did and she put a gentle hand on his knee, obviously saying something as Eddie suddenly stood up and looked at Lily contritely. She gestured furiously in the direction of Eddie's desk and he scurried back. "Thanks for letting me know."

"Well, I was letting you know with ulterior motives in mind," David said. "I'm going to be in the New Lands in about a week to help process the refugee return and wanted to know if you were up for a celebratory dinner."

"Celebratory dinner? Shouldn't you be having that with your sister?" Lily asked, amused. Were this someone who didn't know who her husband was, she'd think this was a proposition for a date. But David had kept in contact with her since the AIAA conference in Lafayette, mostly by email, and had never seemed interested in anything more than friendship.

"She's got a week to feed me," David answered cheerfully. "There's only so much poutine and sugar pie you can eat before you explode. Besides, I'm going to be stuck in Aliyah with all of the XSE types. There's a reason I quit this gig and they're it. I'm really, really going to need to talk to a sane human being for a few hours. Please?"

"My parents are still here," Lily warned, nodding and holding up a finger to indicate 'wait one minute' to Roger and Radek, who were hovering outside of her cubicle space. "And I haven't been able to spend any time with them because of this mess. They love their grandson, but they didn't travel here from the States to be my emergency babysitters. Why don't I agree to at least catch up with you in person when you're here, but I can't commit to anything more grandiose than coffee right now."

"It shall have to do," David sighed dramatically. 

"All right then. I've got a couple of your former cohorts hovering around me like wraiths, so I gotta run. I'll see you in a week or so."

"Count on it."

Lily hung up the phone and waved to Roger and Radek, the latter of whom was distracted by Annie Herskovitz leaning over her desk to fiddle with her printer cartridge. Lily allowed herself to feel mildly relieved that Annie had been on vacation in the States for the entire Genosha crisis; the spring was turning out to be quite mild and she wasn't sure how much work would have gotten done with Annie in short sleeves.

A week later, the celebratory dinner turned into a celebratory coffee and cookie in the park across the street from Midnight Sun Laboratories. David had turned out busier than he thought he'd be - three Magistrates had escaped detention in Genosha and much of the XSE force had stayed there to make sure nothing endangered the Cable-brokered peace accord, leaving a skeleton crew to organize and process the return of the five hundred refugees. Lily herself was just barely emerging from a haze of work in her own right - the Chronography group had the two-pronged task of both assimilating the data acquired through the entire Genosha crisis as well as preparing documentation for the UN Mutant Interests Task Force. If she had ever harbored the delusion that she was a scientist and not a bureaucrat, the past week had forever banished that idea. 

But Lily had to admit that she enjoyed herself, even just across the street from the labs. David was a dramatic storyteller, waving his hands and arms expressively to describe the action in Genosha and had Lily in stitches with the tale of the gamma-level empath, a recent recruit to the XSE, who had led a unit of soldiers through town in pursuit of what he thought was a hungry child but was in fact a hungry Airedale. 

When all was said and done, by the time Absolom Vedras, the former Minister for the Exterior, was inaugurated as the new President of Genosha, Lily was ready to sleep for a year. Ji-Won and Kyung had volunteered to show her parents around the New Lands a couple of times and Lily was finally able to join their explorations in time for the great family expedition to the Ninth Biosphere. Scott and Jean had stopped by the New Lands en route back to New York and Lily took them and her parents to the Ninth Biosphere, which was maintained as a nature conserve. Scott offered to fly her parents back to the States in the Blackbird and they agreed to cut their vacation short two days (in return for the much shorter, much more comfortable ride home) after Jean successfully wrangled a promise out of Lily to spend Christmas in New York. 


	22. February 2011

"Hey, guys! Take it easy! Remember that Tania's younger than you are," Lily called down from the terrace. In the yard below, Dane and Diego looked up with matching innocent expressions. 

The visit had been planned since Christmas, when Callisto had approached Lily and told her that Piotr was being invited to open an exhibit of his works at the New Lands National Museum of Art. The week after the premiere coincided with the spring break for New York City public schools and Piotr had suggested turning the visit into a family vacation. Lily was delighted to host them, even if it meant digging Dane's old crib out of storage. 

Piotr looked down as well. "Eh," he scoffed with what Lily knew was his fatherly bemusement. Tania, the latest addition to the family, was some sort of a shape-shifter, although the limits of her abilities thus far seemed to be to turn herself into an shapeless blob of yellowish goo when she was scared. "She is a tough little one. Diego gets as good as he gives."

Diego was in kindergarten now and Dane had been openly jealous of the homework he had brought with him. Privately, Piotr and Callisto were torn over Diego's continued presence in their family - even as they loved the boy dearly, it pained them that there were no other foster families who would take care of him. His mutation had proven resistant to any sort of permanent treatment or even long-term control and Callisto had spoken angrily of the shallowness of those who could not see through the unbeautiful exterior to the warm-hearted, generous child underneath. Lily in turn wondered when Piotr and Callisto would start investigating adoption proceedings.

Callisto was not present this evening; she was at the other end of the country meeting with a community of former Morlocks. Piotr had stayed behind on account of another visitor to the New Lands who had stopped by. 

"I have to admit that this bit of summer is quite nice," Kurt Wagner mused as he gestured vaguely with his wine glass towards the trees. The New Lands followed the seasonal changes of the Southern Hemisphere. "It has been a brutal winter thus far in New York. And I say this as a proud - and furred - Bavarian." 

The government of the New Lands had close ties with the XSE, which maintained an office in Aliyah. Kurt, one of the three ranking field commanders along with Sam Guthrie and Scott, had come down for the semi-annual inspection. He was still in his XSE uniform, but the collar was open and he looked comfortably off-duty. Dinner had been a festive affair and now the children worked off their energies with a soccer ball as the adults sat enjoying a sampling of the New Lands' burgeoning fruit and cheese industries. 

Lily was thoroughly enjoying herself. Out of all of the people she had met through Alex, Piotr and Kurt were the ones who felt most like _her_ friends and not hers-by-proxy. Part of it was obviously circumstance - they had both only been living in the States for a short time when Alex had disappeared, so she had had the least dealings with them framed by their relationship to him. But part of it was something amorphous, a combination of their generosity and their easy respect for her. After Dane had been born, almost all of the X-types had been pressuring her to at least tie herself closer to the team if not move to Westchester and let herself be subsumed into it. Except for Piotr and Kurt, both of who had quietly given their unwavering support to her attempt to be independent. Scott had been her most vocal champion, at least that's what she'd gathered from hearsay, but without Kurt and Piotr, Lily wasn't sure she would have been able to pull it off. 

"Lily?" Kurt touched her arm lightly. 

"I'm sorry, Kurt," she apologized. "I had my head in the clouds for a second, I guess. What did you say?"

"I asked if it snowed here in the wintertime," Kurt replied. "But perhaps I should ask if you are all right. You seem to have... lost some of your effervescence."

"Oh, I'm fine, really," she assured him, smiling at Piotr as well as he had turned back from where he had been keeping an eye on the children to give her a skeptical glance. "I'm just being a little... nostalgic, I think. I don't get a chance to do that much here."

"Forgive me for saying so," Kurt began, pursing his lips in mock censor. "But was that not one of the reasons you came down here?"

"Oh, don't the two of you gang up on me," Lily chided lightly, reaching for a slice of apple. And yet that's what she missed most about being in the New Lands - being so far away from everyone who knew her best. She had made friends here, mostly through work and also through Dane, but still. Even as she knew it was unfair to hold Amy and her other new friends up to Orly's standard, or even Piotr and Kurt's. 

"One little truth and we are ganging up on her," Piotr sniffed, cutting a small piece of cheese. 

"We are so underappreciated," Kurt sighed. He looked heartbroken as he reached for a strawberry. 

"It is the way of things," Piotr agreed mournfully.

"Keep going, you, two," Lily laughed. "I've got my CPR certification. I can save you if you drown in your self-pity." 

"And we would be grateful for such heroism," Kurt promised. "But your nobility won't actually distract us, you know." 

Lily frowned as Piotr and Kurt adopted similarly expectant expressions that did not waver despite a victorious squeal from Tania shattering the quiet.

"My contract with the lab is up at the end of June," she finally confessed with a sigh, leaning back and sipping her wine in defeat. 

"Nathan isn't thinking of replacing you, is he?" Kurt asked with surprise, one eyebrow cocked. "Not after all of the work you have done, all of the progress that has been made under your guidance. He wouldn't..."

"He's talking about shifting some of the lab's resources to North America." 

"Someplace closer to the XSE base?" Piotr asked curiously. "To Westchester? Manhattan?"

"Someplace close to there," Lily replied, nodding. "Someplace that doesn't require two days of normal travel or a teleporter. Someplace that would be higher profile to gain quicker acceptance of chronography. We hardly represent at conferences and barely register in mainstream academia." 

Nathan had floated the idea at Christmas. Well, not floated per se because Nathan didn't do that sort of thing, but he had broached the topic. It was too much of an effort as it stood for either Lily or any of the group subleaders to travel to academic congresses and other places that could help 'spread the gospel.' Privately Lily also suspected that a recent severe illness had Nathan feeling his own mortality a bit and he wanted to assure that the work Lily's team had been doing wouldn't be lost with him. 

"From the XSE standpoint, it would make sense," Kurt mused, leaning forward so that his forearms rested on his knees. "Genosha proved that we can make use of chronography on at least a limited basis. Moving things closer to home would open up the resources.... Closer to home. That is it, is it not?"

"Yes and no," Lily agreed, looking up at the night sky. It was so hard to tell that they were inside of a giant bubble. "I've been thinking about returning to the States and I feel guilty that I'm not dismissing the thought out of hand."

"For Dane's sake?" Piotr asked.

"By which he means what certain Westchester residents might have to say about it," Kurt added, arching an eyebrow when Lily turned to him. "As well as giving up the freedoms he enjoys here." 

"Westchester's not anything I'm worried about," Lily admitted with a wry shrug. "He's been getting tutored in his powers for almost a year, plus there have been so many technological advances since we got here that there's absolutely no argument for keeping him in Westchester that doesn't fall apart when looked at seriously."

The visit at Christmas had been reassuring on that point. Every year after the Merge meant another year of mutants becoming more a part of regular society, even if they didn't enjoy the openness and accommodations of the New Lands.

"But..." Kurt prompted when she didn't continue. 

"But as far as he's concerned, he's lived here his entire life," she went on. "Almost of his friends, all of his experiences -- that he remembers -- are here. And, yes, even with all of the tutoring and technological advances that will make 'mainstreaming' him possible, it's still going to be a hard adjustment and he _is_ going to have his freedom of movement circumscribed. He took a long time to get over the bathroom accident and this is a place where they're better prepared to both prevent reoccurrences and deal with the aftermath without turning it -- or him -- into a freakshow. 

"And I can tell myself that unless I plan on staying until he's an adult, we're going to have to make this transition at some point," she continued. "I can say that it will be good for him to be close to his family -- both sides -- and he has friends in America already and will make more... but I wonder if that's just an excuse because _I_ want to go back. And that's a whole other kettle of fish."

Piotr and Kurt exchanged a look Lily didn't know how to interpret.

"Would you like the short version or the long version of the 'it's okay to be happy' speech?" Piotr asked with a gentle grin. "I have been on the receiving end of both several times."

"I have, too, Pete," Lily pointed out. 

"Yes, but he listened," Kurt retorted mildly, ignoring Lily's stuck-out tongue. "If you are looking for outside validation that, no, moving your family back to the States is not the selfish act of a self-absorbed person, then consider it found. Living here, far from your family and your friends and the life you had built for yourself in New York, has been a sacrifice."

"But--"

"Whatever your reasons for doing so," Kurt went on, not letting her interrupt. "Which, if we were to consider in hindsight could be grossly oversimplified to making Dane comfortable, making yourself comfortable, and satisfying the intellectual curiosity that Nathan whetted. But time has passed and now both Dane and you have the possibility of being comfortable elsewhere and, if Nathan is going to be moving the lab closer to the XSE, then you can continue your work for him there. The New Lands were a haven and an opportunity, but it should not become a prison."

"It's not a prison. Not yet," Lily amended. "Staying here would not be some kind of noble sacrifice. I have work here I love -- and people I enjoy working with. I feel a little traitorous at the idea of abandoning them even though I know that they'll all get along fine without me." 

"Work was not the reason you moved down here," Piotr pointed out gently. "Should it be the reason you stay? Especially if you can still pursue your interests closer to your roots?"

"It's not really that simple," Lily said. "I didn't exactly... I left in a huff." 

Kurt and Piotr both chuckled.

"Did you notice any hard feelings when you came back for Christmas?" Kurt asked. "You did not. And you know us all well enough to appreciate that there is no such thing as 'best behavior' for visitors."

Lily couldn't help but laugh. The mansion might be XSE headquarters now, the X-Men turned into the XSE and wearing official uniforms and carrying official rank, but it had been very much the same old gang.

"Excuse me for a moment," Piotr said, standing up and putting his wine glass down.

"Tania," he called down. "It is time for you to practice your swimming techniques in the bath, my dear." When she did not come up the stairs, he went down to fetch her. He returned with the little girl in his arms, both with matching smiles. "That's my girl," he told her, kissing her forehead. "And when you are a little older and a little taller, you shall beat them by _two_ goals."

"She didn't beat us," Diego challenged as he followed Piotr up the stairs with a stomp. "We had four and she had two. And Dane let her have the second one because he thought she was going to turn into goo if we didn't let her."

"There are two of you and one of her," Piotr reasoned as Lily stood up to hold open the back door. "So her goals should count twice as much. And Dane was being chivalrous. He was being a gentleman."

"Just 'cuz she's not _his_ sister," Diego replied with a frown as he headed back down the stairs to Dane. 

Lily and Kurt were left to hold their amusement until Diego was safely out of earshot. 

* * *

### April 2011

"I've traveled to the other end of the planet to do just the thing I fled my own country rather than do," David Robitaille complained cheerfully as he led Lily through the sporting goods store. He was visiting the New Lands in pursuit of a contract for a boarding school for mutants in a suburb of Sydney. They were here presently because she had wanted to make a pit stop before they went off for the afternoon to Biosphere Four. "You want to know why I love Australia so much? They've never heard of Alex Ovechkin or Sidney Crosby."

The plan was simple - a new hockey stick for Dane, who was three weeks into his first year of organized hockey. Lily happened to think that 'organized hockey' was overstating it a bit - all the kids did right now was learn how to stand still while they were loaded down with equipment and learn how to skate by going back and forth across the width of the rink. Radek, unsurprisingly, had suggested it - he was instructing in a kids' recreational league and they were starting a new division for four-to-seven year olds. Dane would be four in a couple of weeks and Lily had been at a loss for what to do with him for the winter. The league ran through mid-June, which allowed her the comfort of not having to yank Dane out of his activity when they moved back to New York. 

She smiled wryly. "And yet you not only know who they are, you can discuss their various merits."

As befitting a country nestled into the polar ice cap, winter sports were hugely popular in the New Lands and the nation had earned its first Olympic medals the previous year at the Winter Games. 'Extreme' winter sports - activities done outside the protective bubbles - were quite popular with the younger crowd. Lily had gone cross-country skiing outside the bubbles twice, both times during the White Nights season, and thought it fun if a little overrated. 

David waved his free hand dismissively at her. "Nephews."

With so many former citizens of interested nations, hockey was a popular sport both to watch and to play in the New Lands and there was talk about starting to put together a national team. It also happened to be a very mutant-friendly sport -- all of the required protective equipment ended up compensating for a wide variety of mutations, from Dane's electric touch to his young teammate Darryl's heat vision (Darryl's visor was amply hidden from stray elbows by his full face shield). Dane, for his part, was wild about the game. Hence the search for a birthday present. Dane's age group was still learning how to skate on their own; skating with a stick in pursuit of a puck was still down the line. 

David gave a pained smile to the clerk who had come over to help them. "We're here for someone's first hockey stick," he told the chubby man. 

"He's four, he's about this high," Lily added, holding a hand up to the spot on her body where Dane came up to, "and he shoots right. And he's electrokinetic."

"Electrokinetic?" The man mused, gesturing for David and Lily to follow him towards the rear of the store where the stick display stood. "Does he have the right gloves? They make 'em so that he won't shock anyone."

"He's got a pair," Lily assured him. They had been very expensive and had had his name written on them in large print with indelible ink. "And he knows better than to let them out of his sight." 

"Alright," the clerk said with a thoughtful sigh. "Well then, considering he's a little one and all, I'd suggest the plastic-finished beta composites. Those'll be fine even if he's not wearing his gloves. Except if he's an alpha..."

"He's an alpha."

"Oookay," the clerk murmured, changing the direction of where he had been reaching. "Wood composite it is."

Twenty minutes later, Lily stowed the ribbon-topped hockey stick in the back seat of David's car and they were off to Biosphere Four, where the weather was supposed to be a comfortable twenty-six centigrade, as opposed to the eight it was currently in Biosphere Three. 

They were close to the border, so the trip only took about half an hour. It was about enough time for Lily to regale David with the story of the plans for a 'moving highway.' When the New Lands had been plotted out, mass transit had been given the edge over automobile traffic, perhaps too much so in hindsight. During the time Lily had been living in the New Lands, a new inter-bubble highway had gone from being a nice idea to a necessity and bids from all over the world had been solicited. Some civil engineering firm from Sweden had proposed an auto version of a moving sidewalk - a highway that by itself went a specified distance per hour. There had been discussion as to whether cars would simply park on the moving highway, thus saving energy by being turned off until reaching their destination, or whether cars would simply be allowed to drive at the current speed limit, allowing relative motion to get them home faster. The idea was preposterous in terms of common sense - even if it could be built, the laws of physics would make all but the most minor of accidents much more dangerous - but it had captured the imagination of the populace. 

They were still contemplating increasingly gruesome problems in projectile motion when they pulled into Torreda National Park, named after an especially brave soldier from the Battle at Akkaba. While they had had grand plans of a picnic basket and blanket, they made do with a giant beach towel (that was larger than the sheets for Lily's bed and had 'Greetings from Hilton Head' on it) and a grocery bag containing deli sandwiches, iced tea, and a bag of grapes. Cheerfully and pointedly leaving their coats in the car, they found a quiet spot on the large lawn that was not quite in earshot of the older woman with the radio playing Count Basie. 

It being a Saturday afternoon, there were many kids running around the park and Lily was grateful that they were in the distance. Her tolerance of screeching and squealing wasn't that high even when her son was the one making the gleeful noises. Dane probably was at the moment, as he was off at his hockey practice. After hockey, he had a play date with one of his teammates and she would be home in time to pick him up from that. 

Frankly, she was relieved to have an afternoon to do nothing but laze in the grass. Not having to take care of Dane, not having to go crazy at work -- both the everyday matters as well as the upcoming splitting of the Chronography group into two units, not having to stress about the long list of things that needed to be done before the move back to New York. At least she didn't have to go house hunting this time and she already had the paperwork to enroll Dane in the TriBeCa preschool Diego had attended. 

"You are starting to think too hard again," David warned her, pointing accusingly with a pickle slice. "I can hear the gears turning from here."

"And I thought it would be the smell of smoke that gave me away," Lily laughed in response. 

She tried to clear her mind of all that was seemingly constantly running through it. With David, it should be easy; he was never serious about anything. The only time she had ever seen him drop the devil-may-care attitude had been during the Genosha mess the previous year. She was sure he took his work seriously; Nathan wouldn't have trusted him in the first place, let alone brought him back for a second tour otherwise. But David worked hard to cloak his professionalism and it was easy to forget that he had spent many years doing very deadly work. 

"So tell me," he began, rolling onto his stomach so that he could lean over his plastic plate and drip pickle juice onto it instead of himself. "Is this nicer than Central Park?"

Lily put down her bottle of iced tea and looked around. "Yes and no," she finally said. "The trees and grass and flowers are nicer, no doubt, but... Central Park is an oasis in the middle of a world of concrete and steel. These parks? They're beautiful spots, but there's less of a contrast. If you sit on the Great Lawn, you can look over the trees in any direction and see high-rises. Here, you just see sky."

"I shall have to try it out next time I'm in North America," David mused, wiping his mouth delicately. "I've never been to New York City. Which is ridiculous considering you can drive there from Montreal. And I've been so many other, less interesting, places in the States. Including Washington, which is just a muddle of geopolitical confusion. It's neither a state nor a proper city. Why didn't you people just put it _in_ a state? Why can't you be like every other nation on earth and just have a capital city? It's not like you need it to be like the Vatican, separate from all earthly politics."

"We thrive on being different," Lily offered, shrugging her shoulders. It had been twenty years since she'd had to think seriously about any sort of American civics beyond registering to vote. Which she was going to have to do again and she made a mental note to add that to her formal list of bureaucratic chores. "Man, it's going to be weird thinking like an American again. I honestly suspect I'm a little bit out of the habit."

The New Lands were very active in establishing its own identity and Lily had found it quite easy to start thinking like a local and not like a temporary resident or even a transplant. She remembered her first visit here, with Alex, and how they had both been amused to see how quickly Ji-Won had adapted her worldview. But now, in hindsight, it was completely unsurprising. Lily hadn't bothered to get New Lands citizenship, settling for Landed Immigrant status (Dane, as a mutant, received automatic dual citizenship, as had Alex), but that really didn't make much of a difference in day-to-day life. She could crack jokes about how the residents of Biosphere Eleven had not recovered their reputation after nearly cracking their biosphere dome during a Two Days celebration a few years back ('President Lehnsherr says that the New Lands are like a giant village and every village needs its idiots'), she complained about how no matter how nice the light rail system was it was still impossible to run a country without sufficient highways, and she had a share of the national paranoia every time another nation's sports teams refused to come to visit for a tournament. Just another local, at least for another few months.

"I think I'm going to miss being here for the Two Days festivities," Lily went on. She and Dane were leaving for the States at the end of June and the anniversary of the Battle at Akkaba was in early August. But it wouldn't have worked out if she had tried to stay; Nathan needed her at the new lab at the start of the fiscal year and Dane would need time to get adjusted to his new life before being dropped into preschool. Also, the New Lands had adopted the European habit of making August a vacation month and finding the necessary labor and services to pack up and leave the country would not have been easily available.

"You just like getting invited to the Presidential Ball," David accused, crumpling up the paper his sandwich had come in. "You're going to have to get used to being a small fish in a big pond back in the States. No chatting casually with Councilors, no dinner dates with the executive officers..."

"At least until the next family dinner, when I have to ask the head of the XSE to pass the salt," Lily retorted with a snort. "I honestly think that dropping out of the public view will be one of the best things about the move." 

After Genosha, the Chronography Group had endured a sharp spike in public awareness. What had once been just another of the New Lands' bevy of cutting-edge labs had become a symbol. Of what, Lily wasn't quite sure, but it was supposed to be good. She accepted that there had to be a degree of public exposure for professional reasons; they *were** trying to get Chronography established as a legitimate field. 

But there was the occasional appearance on a news program and cover article on the lab and then there was the cult of celebrity. Especially with anything involving the X-Men. The New Lands had their own celebutantes and others who existed only to be on the gossip websites and Lily felt nauseated every time she saw her name in bold print outside of the context of a professional journal. It happened, more than she'd like. Her X-Men/XSE connections were well-known and it bothered her that she had to shield Dane from paparazzi who wanted to take pictures of Havok's son. 

"You've only got a couple of months until you're not even the hundredth most interesting person on your island," David promised. 

The afternoon passed peacefully and enjoyably. David had been promising for months to digitize his photo album of some of the absurd things that he had seen during his international travels and now he'd finally loaded them on to a memory stick that could be plugged in to his tablet. Lily knew that being in Nathan's network wasn't all superspy heroics; two years with Roger and Radek had familiarized her with the very real fact that a good deal of it was sitting around and waiting. As such, David had been able to cultivate his taste in the weirdness of daily life around the globe. There was one photo of goats milling around in front of a university building in Greece that Lily begged for a copy of - the white stone of the building was similar enough to Steinman back at City College that, combined with the goats, it looked like a perfect way to encapsulate her time there. 

Eventually, they had to pack up and head back so that Lily could retrieve Dane. Karen Coulty, Matthew's mom, was an extremely enthusiastic homemaker - Lily had said that she'd pick Dane up around 5:30, but she knew that if she wasn't there by 5:40, Dane would be parked at the dinner table and fed. It had happened twice before and Lily always felt guilty because there was so little she thought she could do to make it up to Karen, who in turn insisted that it was no trouble and Lily had nothing to repay. Lily liked Karen - it was hard not to - but always felt a little inadequate in her presence. Matt Coulty went to pre-school only in the mornings, not all day like Dane, and purely so he could have playmates. 

Anticipating the traffic on the way back to Biosphere Three - they hadn't been the only ones using the weekend afternoon to take a break from the cold weather - they had given themselves extra time for the return trip. Lily also wanted to get the hockey stick back home and hidden in her closet before Dane saw it. There was less traffic than expected and they managed to pull into her driveway with more than enough time before she had to go pick up Dane.

Hockey stick stowed - the front closet would have been better, but Dane had already been yelled at twice recently for sneaking in there to try to disassemble the vacuum cleaner - Lily stopped off in the kitchen to retrieve the plastic container that Dane had come home with last week because Karen had packed an extra lunch for Dane for hockey practice because Lily had left Dane's at home by accident the week prior. "Of course, I'd have eaten the roast beef sandwich instead of the egg salad, too," she sighed. 

"You'll let me know if you can get away for lunch on Monday," David said as he waited for her to lock the front door. He was leaving Monday evening for Sydney and his last meeting was a morning one. 

"I'll do my best," she promised, following him down the steps. "Amy and I are assembling the transition team this week, but I don't think we'll be in that much of a groove that we can't break for lunch outside the office."

It was supposed to be a quick farewell hug and a peck on the cheek, so Lily was surprised when it turned into a much more adult kiss. Surprised even further when she returned it.

"What?" he asked quietly, concern on his face after she pushed away.

"I can't do this. I can't."

"Why not? We're friends, we find each other attractive..."

"That's not the point. I'm still married."

"To a man who hasn't been on this Earth in four and a half years," he pointed out without rancor. 

"Don't you dare give me the 'time to move on' talk, David," Lily hissed. "I've heard it too many times."

"I'm not asking you to forget about him. I'm not asking you to stop loving him, even," he replied, shrugging in that carefree way that Lily normally found endearing but right now found terribly wrong. "This isn't about commitments made or broken. This is about you remembering that when you're not Dane's mother and Alex's widow and Nathan's scientist, you are still a woman. Being all of those things doesn't mean that you're not allowed to have your own needs."

Lily just stared at him, still too shocked at the whole situation to speak. 

"I'm not proposing to you," David went on, smiling his most charming and innocent smile. "I'm propositioning you. No strings, no commitments, no promises to be faithful forevermore. Just an offer to spend a little time having a bit more fun than you have on your own. Hells, you're moving back to the States soon, it'll probably be a one-time offer."

She shook her head. "I'm not a casual sex kind of person, David. I wasn't even before I met Alex. I can't separate the deed from everything else that goes with it."

David sighed, then shrugged again. "I'm not sure whether to envy you or pity you."

"I don't want either," she replied, pushing herself off of the car where she had been leaning. 

David nodded once, then turned to go to his car. 

"I'm sorry," she said after him, loud enough that she knew he'd hear her. Thankfully, none of her neighbors were around and there was no audience. 

"So am I," he replied with a sad smile. "It would have been fun." 

Lily watched him get into his car and drive off. As the rented Ford turned the corner and disappeared out of sight, she let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. Taking the plastic container off of the roof of the Subaru, she got into the car and put the key into the ignition. She didn't bother turning it; she was crying too hard to be able to drive. 

Dane was halfway through with his lasagna by the time Lily made it to the Coultys. Karen took one look at her bloodshot eyes, put a gentle hand on her shoulder, and offered to wrap some up for her as well.

* * *

### 22/October 2011

"And with that, I'd like to thank Doctor Summers for granting us this personally guided tour through her very new and very interesting field," Joe Perotelli said into the microphone and then clapped, cueing the audience to being their applause. 

Lily smiled and nodded her head, pleased that the reaction had been so positive. It wasn't surprising, not the way it would have been at the first conference at which she'd spoken about chronography, but it was still a nice ego boost. 

The invite to give a talk at MIT had come two days after an article in the Science section of the _New York Times_ made mention of the fact that Midnight Sun was opening up a research facility in the city. Joe - and Lily was surprised at the ease with which she was accepting being able to use first names with her former professors - had been insistent and enthusiastic about Lily bringing chronography to the school. "It'll garner a lot of interest," he had assured her. "You might even get a few recruits out of it."

Even if it weren't her alma mater, Lily would probably have accepted the offer. One of the main reasons for opening a facility in North America, after all, had been to make chronography more accessible. And there was no one more accessible than undergraduates. Although Lily had been a little surprised at the variety in the audience - there had been plenty of grad students and some faculty there as well. 

Lily accepted congratulations from several members of the audience, including the chair of the mechanical engineering department, and answered questions that hadn't had a chance to be asked during the designated period until Joe apologized profusely to the still-waiting group and dragged Lily off, promising that she'd reappear momentarily at the reception. 

He clapped his hands with glee as they headed back to his office so that Lily could drop off her notes. "That was great! Absolutely great! We're gonna get a bumper crop in fluid flow, I know it," he crowed. 

Her talk had mostly been about the lead-up and after-effects of Genosha and the Chronography group's role therein. A year removed from the events, Lily had been able to joke about the panic even as she hadn't downplayed the fear. In fact, she went into the fear in great detail; it was the most effective way, she felt, to emphasize just how non-theoretical this field was. Chronography wasn't simulations and equations and philosophy; the wrong decision in a time of crisis would get people killed as surely as a wrong decision in the field would.

"I'm glad to do my part in your recruitment drive," Lily said, laughing at his enthusiasm. 

"Hey, five years down the line, those kids are gonna be yours," Joe replied, nodding sagely. "You're gonna have your own private army of chronographers."

"And I will be the last member of my family to acquire said private army," Lily retorted dryly as she dug through her bag for her cell phone. "Man, I hate this thing. Now that I'm back in New York and it's not international long distance, people keep calling me." There were three voicemails and a dozen texts and the phone had only been off for a few hours. She didn't even want to imagine what her email inbox looked like; the smartphone was her nomination for Worst Invention Ever.

"It's the way of the world," Joe said with a shrug as he held the door open for her. "Remember the good old days when we had to write letters and carry change for the pay phones?"

The first voicemail was from Dane, courtesy of Piotr's phone, calling to tell his mother that he'd scored a goal in practice. Lily had found him a hockey league and Piotr had signed Diego up as well. The second message was from Amy, who must have been calling first thing in the morning New Lands time, telling her to expect 'a shitload' of raw data later that day because the quarterly reports had been finished. The third was from Tom, her second in command in New York, confirming Lily's suspicion that there had been an error in the latest report by Ubi Wadkins' mathematical brigade and promising her that it wasn't bad enough to set anything back. 

"Everything all right on the home front?" Joe asked as Lily took the phone away from her ear. She knew he hadn't forgotten the events of Lily's last visit to Cambridge.

"Yeah, although I should call back my little Wayne Gretzky and congratulate him before he goes to bed."

Twenty minutes later, Lily had a glass of wine in her hand and was explaining to the circle of people around her what sorts of diverse fields were required to support any sort of chronography work. It was still the general perception that chronography was purely a math-heavy science and Lily was happy to point out that there were historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers within the group. Chronography was as much about qualitative as quantitative analysis and there were still large swaths that utterly lacked any sort of scientific precision, although they were certainly working on that. 

There seemed to be a lot of interest in the day-to-day operations of both research groups, Lily noticed by the time the chafing dishes had been brought out. She took it as a positive sign - people weren't asking what chronography was anymore; they were asking how it worked and what it could do. The simple answer was that the Midnight Sun Laboratory in the New Lands was the harvester of data and the Midday Sun Group (lame name, Lily thought, but not her choice) in New York was the processor of that data. Amy's people were the ones trying to built up and solidify the foundations of chronography, Lily's group of specialists were the ones looking for applications.

Otherwise, the biggest difference between the groups was that they were on opposite ends of the globe. Lily still got updates from Roger or Radek and still questioned the species of Sagerstein's parents on a regular basis. But, except in times of crisis, they were all Amy's problem now and while she still spoke to her friend daily about items both work-related and not, she had a new group of lunatics to meet minds with. Twelve members of the original group - the not-so-Dirty Dozen - had come with Lily to New York and the cramped offices on the fortieth floor of the WR Grace Building across the street from Bryant Park on 42nd Street. Twelve new members had been found, mostly from the junior ranks of academia, as Lily had been, and two grad students. HisDAs had been left behind entirely with the exception of Alice Epstein, a perky New Zealander who had an uncanny way of skimming data and coming away with the right conclusion. Sagerstein had nearly threatened suicide if Alice were to be taken from him; Lily had offered to pay for the funeral.

It was to this new group that Lily returned to the following afternoon, walking up from Penn Station to check in on the quarterly reports that should have already arrived and be halfway looked-over. 

"How did the spreading of the gospel go?" Tom Ivalesci asked as he followed Lily to her desk. As with the office in the New Lands, the space here was common area and everyone from Lily down sat in low-walled cubicles. There were three conference rooms against the wall furthest from the windows, one large enough to hold staff meetings and briefings, the other two smaller and used by subgroup teams needing quiet. 

"It's a shame I stopped going to church when I was a teenager," Lily replied, not looking up from the pile of mail. "I dare say I'm getting good at this."

Unlike the office in the New Lands, however, the fortieth floor was protected by XSE officers. Nathan had insisted and when Lily had balked, Scott and Logan had backed him up and Lily had known that she hadn't had a chance. Later on she had found out that there had been bomb threats by an anti-mutant terror group, but by that point she had gotten used to the presence. The current officer on duty, Greta Soderstrom, was a young woman barely out of the XSE's training program (and nonetheless a qualified sniper and hand-to-hand expert) who always had a package of salty licorice around should Dane be brought by for a visit. 

"The Catholics don't let women preach," Tom replied easily, leaning over to take a binder off of his desk and flip to the page he wanted. 

"Details, details," Lily muttered as she frowned at the mess on her desk. She wondered why they could build countries under glass but they couldn't have a paperless office. 

"Amy attached a note to the quarterlies saying that I should keep the hard copies on my desk or else you'd lose them," Tom explained as he handed over the binder he had opened. 

"Organization is overrated," Lily replied sourly as she sat down and accepted the binder. 

"She said you'd say that, too."

Lily snorted. "I'm gonna hire someone to put square wheels on her chair." 

"In my neverending attempt to outdo your memories of Ms. Dominguez's stellar work," Tom said, "I've already taken the liberty of hiring out a contractor for just that service."

Lily looked up at Tom, who was watching her with a straight face. Tom's humor tended towards the desert-dry and he had such a steady deadpan that he could easily scare those unfamiliar with him. 

"Good boy," she finally replied. "Now go grab Ahearn and Wu and let's see what you folks have come up with so far. We're supposed to be the geeky half of this operation. It won't do our rep any good if we can't pull things out of this data that Midnight Sun already has."

With the threat of relegation to 'the Second Division' in the New Lands if brilliance wasn't forthcoming by the end of the week, Lily watched her new team set to work. It was a very different dynamic than that of the group she had left behind - more brash, perhaps, and a little less formal - but Lily was sure that they'd settle into a rhythm just as smooth.


	23. November 2011

He remembered dying, remembered the moment of his death. 

Every single fucking time. 

The first time had been in an explosion, when he had woken up drowning. The second had also been in an explosion, but it was a different kind because it had taken place on the astral plane. The third time, he was pretty sure, had been decapitation. But he wasn't completely positive because after that the order got kind of blurry. The novelty had worn off. The most recent one had been poison and from past experience he could tell even without opening his eyes that he had joined a new world through some means that had him recovering in a bed. After the last life, he could use the rest.

Even if he didn't remember the order in which his deaths had occurred, he did remember them all. Sometimes the circumstances were a bit muddy, although that wasn't always his fault - he'd show up somewhere and then get killed again before he could figure out what he was supposed to have been doing instead of dying. But fate, or whatever power it was that had granted him the existence he had been given, had a decent imagination and a macabre sense of humor and he had rarely died the same way more than once. Which he was immensely thankful for; some of the deaths had been extremely unpleasant. 

At the beginning, when the memories of some of his deaths still made him retch, he had been worried about what sort of long-term affects all of it would have on him. But he hadn't started gibbering yet and, in fact, he'd learned to stop associating 'death' with 'bad' and started looking at the positives. (Okay, so making like Eric Idle in "the Life of Brian" and singing 'Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life' to cheer himself up might not be that far from gibbering. But it worked.) It was the ultimate post-structuralist, post-modernist existence. He'd graduated past death and, with rare exception, taxes. Good, bad, right, and wrong had gone from being absolute to being relative. No matter how bad things got - and they could get pretty bad - it could always be worse. If this reality's Scott wasn't so great, maybe the next one's would be. If he had been hungry or cold in one existence, maybe he'd have a warm bed and good food in another. Permanence was no longer a part of his mindset. Not when he couldn't stay dead.

He wasn't sure how long he had been gone from the life he had started out in - and it still seemed wrong, somehow, to say 'his' life. He had stepped into the lives of so many Alex Summerses and had quickly lost the need to be proprietary about whose life was whose. And yet there was that he had never had to share, never _could_ share. 

But thinking about _that_ one made him ache in parts of his soul that he'd thought frozen over, so he didn't. The crushing disappointment of waking up in another world that was not the one he had been born into was much more painful than any of his deaths. 

There had been other reasons, of course. He had had his share of mental manipulations - Madelyne Pryor seemed to be able to throw one over on him no matter what reality he was in - but the first time he had had a telepath rip thoughts of Lily out his head and use them against him had been the last. After that, he had made fortifying his mental shields part of his routine upon first arriving in a new reality. There had been lessons from kind telepaths in a few different realities and by now his shields were stronger than even some psis', at least in terms of how easy it was to pull stuff out. There was apparently not much he could do about putting stuff in. But his shields would hold even under torture now. This had been proven more than once. 

But verifying his mental shields was only the first part of his 'welcome to a new reality' checklist. The second was to gather as much information about who Alex Summers was in this reality without giving anything away. He had had to get very good at this very quickly. Failure was not an option; disclosure was even less of one. The first time he had committed suicide to escape a reality it had been to get free of the prospect of a life spent drugged up in an institution. 

He sometimes wondered if he'd lost the gift of introspection through lack of use; it had atrophied by neglect. He didn't think often about his various lives -- or at all about the one he'd been born into -- because he was afraid he'd see how much he'd changed and that scared him. Or, more precisely, he was scared that there was nothing of _that_ Alex Summers left, the one he'd been before all others, and that his experiences since then had changed him too profoundly so as to render him unrecognizable. His greatest fear was to get what he wanted, to drop back into the life he had first left, and find himself so out of sync that he'd have no choice but to move on. 

Move on. His motto now. Not as catchy as 'what is, is', but effective. He wasn't a soldier marching singlemindedly towards a battle; he was the Nexus of All Realities. A flux point. Motion. 

"Alex?"

The lights weren't on, he could tell, and the voice wasn't directly over him. But he still didn't open his eyes. 

"I know you're awake, Alex. I don't know where you learned how to strengthen your shields like that, but I know you're awake. If you don't want to talk right now, that's fine. If you _can't_ talk, do me a favor and thin out your shields a little bit so we can carry on a telepathic conversation."

It sounded like Jean, which was often how realities started when they didn't start with Scott or Maddie. But he had been burned too many times with evil Jeans and psychotic Scotts and, well, Maddie was usually a given and it was just a matter of whether or not she had turned evil yet. It was curiously comforting in its consistency - he had gotten rid of the Goblin Force after the first reality, but Maddie and her cosmic twins had just gotten creative instead. But now back to Jean. 

"I'm going to take the radio silence as you just wanting some time to yourself now. It's all right. You must be exhausted and you're probably still pretty sore; Dana's going to be sleeping for a week after pulling you back. You should probably sleep, too, for a while if you can. Sulven's not around, so we have to wait for Nathan to go get Lily and Dane. You're going to meet your son, Alex. He's... you'll find out when you see him. I'll let you rest now."

He heard gentle footfalls, rubber-soled boots on linoleum, fade away. Fairly sure that he was alone now, he opened his eyes. The med lab of the mansion - it generally didn't look too different from reality to reality except for the one where Nathan had died of the techno-organic virus before he could be brought into the future. That reality had been illuminating for its absences; he wondered if even Scott knew just how much of the sub-basement facilities were 38th Century in design. 

Jean's little monologue had been close enough to _that_ reality to make the heartache return unbidden and he had to ruthlessly tamp down his emotions. He had been close enough before. Hope just made the delayed bubble-bursting all the more painful. 

At least he seemed to have hooked up with Lily in this reality. In most of them he didn't. That had been a little disappointing; some gooey romantic part of him (that he was sure had long since been singed away) had hoped that they'd be constants in every reality like Scott and Jean. It made sense that they weren't though, because her presence in _that_ life was solely the result of choices that no other version of him had seemed to make. At least she was alive here. He'd seen her die once and she'd been already dead in another one, both times a victim in his war for good versus evil. 

A son. His son. The one Sulven had accidentally told him about the day before he had died the first time... No. He'd had other 'sons' in other realities, too. A daughter once, too. 

If this wasn't part of another ploy to fuck with his head, then obviously this Alex Summers had been missing for some time. At least that would be different. Easier in most ways, harder in a couple. He had rarely had to account for missing time - his 'side' had usually seen him fall and then either dragged his re-animated carcass back with them or had had to go and rescue him from the bad guys. But as for the rest, it would make it easier to pass as this universe's Alex if his 'memory lapses' were completely understandable. 

As for the other bits gleaned from Jean's words... Danas and Sulvens were more common than Lilys across realities. He suspected it was because Dana was a mutant and was more likely to get involved in the cause and Nathan usually came with an Askani sister or two, if not Sulven then another one. But he had yet to be in a reality where all three co-existed. But, statistically, it was bound to occur more than once and the odds of him encountering one of these realities increased the more he traveled.

He shifted slightly, pushing himself further up on the bed, and his left shoulder popped loudly. The shoulder he'd injured at Akkaba.

Again he tamped down the hope threatening to burst from its cell. No. It wasn't going to be home. There was going to be something off, something so absolutely off that he'd get his proof. 

Diabolical plans or not, Jean was right and he was tired. If Dana had healed him, then he'd still need to sleep off whatever had happened. 

* * *

"Alex, wake up. And don't play dead on me. It's been a long enough day as it is."

Scott's voice. Alex opened his eyes. Looking down, he noticed he was wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt and wondered if they had been on him when he'd woken up before. When he had died in _that_ reality, he had been wearing the remnants of a Kevlar bodysuit. 

There was no point in delaying the inevitable. The sooner he found proof that this was yet another foreign reality, the sooner he could comfortably slip into the role of whoever Alex Summers was here. And then get himself killed for a good cause and move on. He had gotten good at that by now.

He looked up at this universe's version of his brother. And stared.

"Welcome home, bro," Scott said, his voice roughened by emotion. "If I wasn't so happy to have you back, I'd kill you for pulling that disappearing stunt."

Alex shifted gingerly, still sore from whatever had temporarily killed him this time, and sat up. Without exception, he always popped into a reality at the same age he'd been when he'd first died. No matter how many years he lived in any one reality, he was back to being thirty-four-and-a-half in the next one. So seeing Scott looking older - not battle-scarred kind of older, not worn, but just like he'd aged a little - was a little disconcerting. A lot disconcerting, actually. 

"Jesus, Alex," Scott muttered, pulling him into a fierce embrace that he hesitantly returned. "Next time you choose to vaporize yourself, try not to wait five years before you rematerialize? Or at least send back a message? It's hell waiting for you. It really is."

He had been gone for five years after an explosion? Oh, no. No. This... 

"While it is arguable to say that the world has waited for Alexander Summers to finally keep quiet," a familiar voice rumbled from the doorway, "in this case I'd wager that either attempts at withering sarcasm or even your familiar stream of complaints would be music to all of our ears." Hank McCoy, blue fur tinged ever so slightly with silver, appeared in Alex's view as Scott loosened his grip. "Speak, man, speak!"

"Uhhh... Hi?" 

It was extremely lame as far as first words went, but neither Scott nor Hank seemed to care. They appeared to be too happy that Alex said anything at all. The wildly inappropriate cheerful banter was a good sign; it hopefully meant that he hadn't been found and rescued by the enemy, who would have been more careful to seem legitimately concerned. Tact was generally not an X-trait. 

"He's talking now?" Jean asked, shimmying past Hank into the room. She, too, looked older. No less beautiful, but older. 

"Well, he's not quite up to his usual levels of wit and profundity," Hank replied, walking over to the machine to which Alex didn't even realized that he was still attached. "But considering that he's been AWOL, emphasis on the WOL, for the past five years and that we found him..."

"Dehydrated like beef jerky," Jean cut in, frowning at Alex and he couldn't help but smile sheepishly at her baleful glare. Even if he was just going to play along with their relief that their Alex was safe and sound. It was getting harder and harder to keep from hoping. The age differences, the fact that Hank was blue...

"Yes, well," Hank continued, making a face. "Nonetheless, I'd say that a little bit of 'what the hell is going on?' is only appropriate."

"Is this my cue to ask 'What the hell is going on?'" Alex asked hoarsely, relieved that his usual biggest problem upon arriving in a reality was going to be solved so easily. He wouldn't have to explain away his confusion here.

With one hand still on his shoulder, Scott reached over with the other to get him a glass of water and Alex took it gratefully and drained it at once. 

"See, he's getting better by the moment," Hank said with a nod. "That's your cue, by the way, Commander Summers."

"Oh, umm..." Scott sighed and took the glass back from Alex. "All right. Do you remember going to Akkaba to melt down some caves? It was post-Battle cleanup still and we were worried about some of Nur's cults reforming. You had to do it because of the way the mountain was situated. Julio shaking things down would have cut off nearby irrigation. Any of this ringing a bell?"

Oh, god, no. No. "Yeah."

"Something went wrong," Scott continued, a tremor in his voice. "There was an explosion. It was all out of proportion to what you were doing..."

"Heating up the core and flooding the passageways with molten rock," Alex murmured. No. Don't you dare hope, Summers, don't you _dare_.

"It looked like a pile of chocolate ice cream melting," Scott agreed. "You disappeared. We looked for days, but we never found a body."

There was always a body. That's how he was able to always re-set at thirty-four years old. He moved on in spirit, in consciousness, not in body.

"That was almost five years ago, Alex," Jean broke in. "It'll be five years next month."

Alex just shook his head. It couldn't be. It couldn't be. 

"We've had the Cerebro looking for you constantly since then," Scott picked up, running his left hand through his hair. "And we got nothing until last night. We do a routine sweep of the area, just to make sure that nobody's getting any stupid ideas. Two minutes after Cerebro started going off, we got a call from the Egyptian police. They found you lying exactly where you had been standing that day. In the same uniform. You were in bad shape. Nothing that Dana and an IV couldn't fix, but... It was close for a bit."

"Alex?" Jean asked, concern coloring her voice. "I know it's a lot. But that's the worst of it, it really is."

"No, it's not," he whispered, trying to come up with something that would burst the bubble, that would just end the hope pouring through him like blood. This couldn't be. Not when he was too far gone. He knew he was crying, but didn't care. "No, it's not."

"Nathan's leaving in a few hours to go get Lily," Scott said gently. "He brought you back from Akkaba and then had to teleport to Moscow and now he's been sleeping that off so he can go get her and Dane. Dane's your son, by the way. Daniel, although I don't think he answers to it unless he's getting yelled at. Lily blamed you for picking the name."

Alex laughed even as the tears flowed. "I did."

A tissue box floated in the air into his lap and he took one, blowing his nose. 

"We haven't told her yet," Scott said after Alex had accumulated a small pile of dirty tissues. "She's in Virginia visiting with her father for the weekend and we didn't want to tell her before... Before we knew you were all right."

Alex knew Scott didn't mean physically. "Do you know?" Can you tell me that I'm home?

"I told you that I can't get past your shields now," Jean said. "Wherever you were, whatever you were doing, you're impossible to read. We've been operating solely on the fact that you haven't jumped out of bed and tried to kill anyone."

He nodded. The next step was easy. "I'll drop them now," he offered. There was nothing else to do. Either he was home or he wasn't. And if he wasn't, then this Jean would either turn out to be sympathetic to his plight or she'd fry his brain. Either way, it would end the matter. If this wasn't his reality, he'd take the first opportunity presented and find something that would help him move on to the next one. This one was too close, too painful. 

Jean walked over to the bed and reached out to touch his cheek. If this were a trap laid by him, if _he_ were the one who could be dangerous, there would be nothing Jean could do. This was about her trusting him to be real. He wished he still had that kind of faith. But he didn't, nor did he have anything else to lose. He dropped his shields.

"Oh, god, Alex," Jean gasped. Her hand fell away from his face and he opened his eyes to find her supported by Scott, tears running down her face. "Oh, god. How did you live through this?"

"I didn't," he replied in a whisper. "That's the point."

Jean shook her head, wiping away her tears with the back of her hands. "Well, that's going to change. You're home, Alex. You're back. No more moving on." She took his face in her hands and kissed his forehead. "Tell me what I can do to prove it to you. Tell me what I can show you..."

Alex shook his head, he didn't know. Anything he'd remember could have easily come out of his own memories.

Jean kissed his forehead again, wiping away tears from his cheeks with her thumbs. "It's the best I can do," she murmured. 

The next moment, he saw his wedding from Jean's perspective, feeling her amusement as he fumbled with Lily's ring. He saw himself nervous and concerned at the mansion door, bringing Lily to Westchester for the first time and he felt Jean's happiness that he had found someone so important to him. He felt Jean's horror as he appeared as Magistrate Summers of Genosha. And then he saw Lily, looked exhausted and sweaty, holding what must be their newborn son, and he felt Jean feel her anguish at his not being there.

"I want to believe," he whispered, feeling himself lose control. "I want to believe. I'm too tired to fight it anymore. I'm so tired..."

"Rest, then," Jean said quietly near his ear as he wept. "Rest. You're home, Alex. You're home. And I'm so sorry that you've been through so much that you can't believe. I'm so sorry..."

She let him cry himself out on her shoulder, Scott seemingly holding them both up, until he was gasping for air. And then there was a towel and some more water and Jean bade him lie down and told him she was going to knock him out so he could rest and that they'd be there when he woke up. She swore it would be so. And the last thing Alex remembered before falling asleep was praying that he didn't dream.

When he woke up, Scott was in a chair at the side of his bed, chin down, asleep. As Alex knew he would, his brother woke up the moment he swung his legs over the side of the bed. 

"You can go across the hall and shower in the locker room," Scott said as he stood up slowly and stretched, rolling his neck. "Or you can go upstairs and use the shower in your old room. There's probably some of your own clothing there as well. We never cleaned out that dresser and Lily never stayed here long enough to do it herself." 

Still feeling disoriented and unsure of what to do about the nagging doubts in the back of his mind, Alex nodded but said nothing. His sleep had been peaceful for the first time in a long time. Worrying about someone discovering his secret had made him a terrible sleeper over the years, even when he wasn't running for his life. Always having to plan ahead, always having to be in the moment - it was the rare reality where Alex Summers wasn't a soldier in some sort of war. 

"Everyone here knows you're home, but they're kind of under orders to leave you be," Scott went on conversationally. "At least until Lily gets here."

"When is that?"

Scott tilted his head very slightly, a cue Alex recognized as meaning that Scott was talking to Jean along their bond. "Jean says Nathan's finishing his coffee and will probably be gone in ten minutes. Which means you should get moving because she's going to be here before you're done shaving."

Alex nodded again and got off of the bed, feeling the cool tiles under his bare feet. "Was she okay? I mean..."

"I'll let her tell you about it herself," Scott replied with a shrug that conveyed volumes. "But she's one hell of a woman, Alex. A fighter. This wasn't easy for any of us and especially for her. But she pulled herself together for Dane. You've had that to return to. And now you have."

Alex was surprised when Scott moved over and embraced him tightly. But this time, he could return it without pause. "Thanks," he murmured. 

"Jean showed me a little bit about what she saw," Scott said as he pulled away. He shook his head sadly. "I hope you don't feel like the runt of the family anymore in terms of getting tossed around. Nexus of All Realities? Man, if Sinister had known what you'd turn into, he'd have stopped chasing me years ago."

Alex laughed hoarsely and Scott allowed himself a smile. They took Xavier's elevator to the third floor and Scott walked Alex to the door of his room. Judging by the light from the windows, it was early morning. The door to his room was open and Alex was utterly unsurprised to see that it looked like it always had. 

"Jean's obviously been through," Scott commented dryly, gesturing to the folded towel on the bed as they entered. "Do you want me to wait or..."

"I'm... thirty-nine?" Alex asked, not intending to be sarcastic. After so many lifetimes, it was a little strange. He'd been thirty-nine, of course, and fifty in that one reality. But it was still odd to say.

"Yeah, yeah. Old enough not to drown in the shower," Scott muttered, smiling crookedly. "Although you don't look a day older than you did when you left."

"At least there's one perk," Alex said, surprising himself that he'd joke about it all.

"Well, the sense of humor's back," Scott chortled. "And still off-key as ever."

Alex rolled his eyes.

"Oh," Scott paused on his way out the door. "I still have the book I borrowed from you the day... you disappeared. _Lords of Sipan_. It's in the boathouse. I'll get it before you leave."

Alex had been most of the way into the bathroom, but he spun around to face his brother. "Did Jean..."

"Give me something out of your memories that she wouldn't know about but we would?" Scott finished without rancor. If he was bothered by Alex's continued suspicions, he didn't look it. "She didn't. But if you're looking for proof that this is your home reality, then you'll need all the minor details we can provide. I didn't think you were going to feel at ease until Lily got here, but I was wracking my brain to come up with something that might help."

"Thanks," Alex said, meaning it. 

"I lost you once, 'Lex," Scott replied with a shrug. "I don't plan on doing it again."

Alex nodded and waited for Scott to close the door on his way out before getting into the shower. He had taken his clothes into the bathroom with him. Part of it was habit acquired through his various lives and part of it was because he was feeling cold in a way that had nothing to do with air temperature, and the steamy room would at least make him warm on the outside. 

He put his face up to the hot spray, letting it wash away the tears that he knew were falling again. Home. It was almost too much to deal with. No, it _was_ too much to deal with. Which was why he couldn't stop crying. 

How much did he have to catch up on? How did he find a place in the life of a wife who hadn't seen him in five years and a son he'd never met? What if Lily... Scott would have said something if she'd found someone else. But what if she... he wasn't the same person anymore. He couldn't even fake being that person anymore. And Lily was a bright woman and she'd realize that pretty much right away. Intellectually he knew that there was nothing he could do, nothing they could do, but deal with it. No matter how it played out. But that didn't stop his heart from clenching tight in his chest. He _missed_ her, doubly so because he'd so rarely let himself think about her even after the physical distance had stopped making him ache.

In the fluorescent light of the bathroom, he could look over his body and see familiar scars. He had been wounded so many times, _nearly_ died so many times, that there would be only scar tissue were he to have gotten them only on one body. But this body was familiar in a certain way because it bore the marks of the life he remembered as his own. It was _his_. There was the jagged scar on his right inner arm from when he'd fallen in Bahrain during a survey for Lamont-Doherty and had caught his arm on some chain-link fencing. There was the mark from getting mauled by Sabretooth in one of his last fights with X-Factor. There was the not-quite-healed blister from the new shoes he had gotten two weeks before he had left for Akkaba...

He heard a noise coming from the bedroom and pulled his jeans on quickly. "Hello?"

"Hi," was the reply and Alex swore his heart stopped for a beat. It was a little boy's voice.

Alex yanked open the door and the boy on the bed looked up. Oh, god. That was his son. Daniel. Dane. Alex was frozen. His son. 

Alex had thought that that had been especially cruel to have a 'son' in the first reality he jumped to. It had been a blessing that Scotty had known right away that he hadn't been the boy's real father. 

Early on, during that time with Scotty, Alex had often wondered about what his own son would look like. Would he have Lily's eyes, his nose? Scotty had had 'his' blond hair and blue eyes, he'd looked otherwise just like his mother. Dane, who was watching his father with something between curiosity and amusement, looked exactly like Alex but with just enough to make it obvious that Lily was his mother. 

Dane put the colored cube he had been playing with on the bed and got down and walked over to Alex. "You're _my_ Daddy." It wasn't a question. It was a statement. 

Alex crouched down. "Yeah," he said softly, feeling his eyes fill with tears once more. He held out his arms and Dane threw his hands around his neck and held on tightly. Alex could hear him sniffling. 

Picking Dane up, he made his way carefully back to the bed, sitting down blindly and hoping he didn't sit on the illuminated cube. He didn't. 

His son. The baby he'd been so excited about and Lily had been so terrified of. He'd promised her that he'd help her with their child at every step of the way and then he'd disappeared. Alex squeezed his son tightly, as if he could somehow impart five years of love at once, and rocked them both gently. Dane's tears were coming with hitched gasps and Alex rubbed his back gently, trying to soothe him. 

"It's all right," he murmured, kissing his son's hair. "It's all right. I'm here now."

"And so you are," Lily said, her voice wavering and weak, as she stood in the doorway. "I have been waiting to... You and Dane..." she broke off, wiping furiously at the tears. 

Alex couldn't take his eyes off of her. When he'd allowed himself to think of the people he'd left behind, he hadn't focused on the faces. Moving between realities as he did, he always saw Scott's face or Jean's face. He didn't need to remember those. He remembered personalities instead. So to see her in person as well as in spirit... Five years passing would make her thirty-three, but she looked younger than that. She always had. Her face was thinner and her hair shorter than it had been, and her eyes were bright with tears. With her left hand pressed to her mouth, he felt something warm inside him when he saw her wedding ring.

Dane turned his head from Alex's neck to look at his mother and Alex loosened his grip, prepared to let his son flee to the arms of the parent he knew. But Dane didn't move. 

"I found him," he told his mother instead. The tears had mostly dried, although his pale skin was damp.

"You did," Lily replied, trying to smile and not quite accomplishing it. "Even if you were supposed to be looking for Ray."

Dane looked sheepish for all of half a second and Alex chuffed a laugh. "My boy," he murmured, ruffling Dane's hair. His son beamed at him and he felt that same awe. His boy, indeed.

"They were trying to give me a big talk about post-traumatic stress disorder," Lily said, taking a deep breath and pushing off from the doorframe and entering the room. "I figured it's not like I've never seen a shell-shocked soldier before, so I walked away. I think they were hoping I'd be better behaved now that you're home."

Alex smiled. This was the woman he had married. Right down to the avoidance. 

"Hi," he said, holding out his hand. "I think we've met a few times. I'm Alex Summers, Nexus of All Realities."

Lily laughed, but Alex could tell it was very close to devolving into a sob. She took his hand, though, and squeezed it tightly in hers. "Lily Summers, mad scientist."

He didn't let go of her hand, couldn't let go. He could feel her tremble and he wanted to get up and hold her, but he couldn't with Dane in his lap. 

"Sweetheart, can I borrow Daddy for a moment?" she asked and Dane let go and climbed off of Alex's lap to the other side of where his parents' hands were joined. 

Alex stood up and closed the distance between them and pulled Lily into an embrace. She returned it fiercely and he could feel her shake as she tried not to sob. "You can let go," he whispered in her ear. "I'll hold on to you."

She shook her head against his neck even as she continued to tremble. "Later," she replied quietly. "I want to, but right now I've got a son not to traumatize and a family to defend you from."

Alex half-laughed and he wasn't sure why. All of his emotions were swirling around right now and he wasn't sure what would come to the surface at any moment. Too much joy, too much anguish, too much love, too much relief, too much of everything swam through his blood. He felt numb, he felt too much, it was his greatest dream fulfilled, it was his greatest nightmare brought to life. He was nauseous, he was dizzy, he was giddy, his body was thrumming with energy at the _rightness_ of all of this even as his mind was still trying to catch up. He was swallowing down the sheer terror that threatened to engulf him. He didn't want to let go and squeezed harder when Lily pressed herself tighter against him as if he could somehow graft them together so that he'd never be forced apart from her again. As if he could get close enough that she couldn't see the damage. 

"Daddy?"

Alex held his breath for a heartbeat at the title. The first time he had met Scotty... And yet Dane _knew_... "Yeah?"

"Do you like pancakes?"

In all of the surrealness of the day, it seemed a perfectly practical question. Alex had finally come home from lifetimes spent traveling through realities, was holding his wife for the first time in five years and the son he had never met was asking him about pancakes. It made perfect sense. "Yeah," he replied, sparing a glance to look down at Lily, who was smiling wryly as if she expected such a question. "But I haven't had any in years. Your mom used to make pretty good ones. Except she always burned the blueberries..."

A snort of either laughter or tears or (more likely) both from Lily and Alex looked over her head at Dane, who nodded. 

"Mommy made them with chocolate chips once," he went on, digging his fingers into the knit comforter on the bed and kicking his feet happily. If he was at all touched by the weight of the emotions swirling around his parents, Dane was hiding it well and only his own flushed cheeks were testament to his earlier tears. "But they're not pretty like Aunt Jean's are. Aunt Jean makes them round. She said she was going to make some today."

"Do you want to go find Aunt Jean and see if she's started making pancakes yet?" Lily asked, turning within his embrace to face their son. 

"I'll wait for you," Dane replied, still kicking his feet. There was a touch of something in his voice. Alex didn't know what it was and felt a wave of... disappointment? Self-loathing? Something. Because he could tell that something was wrong and had he been around for any of his son's life he would have been able to know what it was. 

* * *

Lily smiled and sighed. She should have known that something like this would happen. It took all of her willpower to loosen her grip on Alex, but she kissed his bare chest quickly and then went to go sit on the bed next to Dane and pull him on to her lap. She hugged him tightly and kissed his head, looking over him to Alex, who was watching and looking a little lost and a lot concerned. She gestured with her head for him to sit down next to them and he did. 

In all of the secret plans she'd had for when Alex would come back to her, in all of the complications she'd terrified herself with, this really hadn't been one of them. 

"Dane," she began, running her fingers through his tousled hair. "Do you know what having your daddy here means?"

Dane looked up at her, blue eyes suspiciously bright. She wondered if Alex could see as much of himself in Dane as she could. Or if any of what she saw was still part of Alex. Jean had been vague and she had been anxious to find Alex and hadn't been listening that closely...

"It means that we can be a family. Like Aunt Jean and Uncle Scott and Colin and Ray and Nathan," Lily went on. Dane nodded in that way he had to show that he was following along but still wasn't convinced. 

"But do you know what it doesn't mean?"

Dane shook his head no. 

"It doesn't mean that I love you any less," she answered, kissing his forehead to emphasize the point. "You're always going to be my number one little guy. Always and forever. Okay?" 

Dane nodded. He didn't talk much, but he had eloquent expressions, her son did. He was embarrassed at having been found out so easily and Lily smiled. She didn't want Dane to think that he was being replaced in her affections. She hadn't ever really considered the possibility that Dane would be jealous or insecure about Alex's return. Partly because Dane was who he was and mostly because she just couldn't wrap her mind around there being any negative side to Alex's return.

"I've loved your dad for years and years and years," she went on, looking down at him instead of at Alex. "Just like I've loved you. There's room in my heart for the both of you. There always has been... So we're cool?"

Dane nodded again, this time more confidently. 

"I think you'll like having your dad around," she went on, finally looking at Alex. He was watching her with an almost frightening intensity and it took effort not to break the eye contact. "He likes hockey, too. And he makes a very good grilled cheese. He doesn't make the toast too dark like I do. And he can help you with your powers..."

"Powers?" Alex asked, clearly surprised. 

Lily smiled. Apparently they hadn't said anything to him. "Dane here is quite the electrokinetic," she explained, ruffling her son's hair. "He's cut himself back to a three exploding light bulbs a week habit."

Alex barked out a laugh, for the first time letting his smile reach his eyes. 

Dane blushed. "Mommy," he sighed and then turned to his father curiously, his insecurity temporarily forgotten. "You have powers, too?"

Alex nodded and held out his hand, palm up. A small ball of plasma appeared, perfectly formed and changing colors from white to blue to purple to red to green to yellow before it disappeared again. Lily tried not to stare. Alex hadn't been able to do that before...

"You can..." Dane trailed off, too awed to speak. He had leaned forward in Lily's lap and now broke free of her grip to reach for Alex's hand. He inspected it, holding up his own smaller one for comparison. "I can't make them stay in my hand," he said mournfully. "They get big and make things explode. I make a lot of things explode..."

Lily frowned at Dane's disappointment. 

"Oh, don't worry about it," Alex told him cheerfully, still holding out his hand for Dane to examine. "When I first got my powers, I had to wear special clothes all the time or else I'd make _everything_ explode. It was years before I could control my powers. And I was a grown-up when I got them."

"You had to wear special clothes, too?" Dane asked, curious and pleased. "I did, too. When I was a baby. But they don't work anymore. Now I have this," he reached down to show off the ankle cuff he wore. 

"It's Reed Richards' latest creation," Lily explained. "It looks like he's a criminal on probation, but it's good for when his control slips. It's a surge protector, basically, not a capacitor, so he's still got to be a very good boy. But he usually is."

"Manifested at birth?" Alex mouthed at her and she nodded. He closed his eyes and shook his head as if in pain. 

"But I'm learning to control it," Dane went on, oblivious to the silent conversation. "I have lessons and practice. Did you have lessons and practice?"

"Oh, yeah," Alex confirmed with an exaggerated nod and Lily smiled ruefully. If she remembered the stories correctly, most of his training and practice had come by getting kidnapped and even his containment suit had come from an enemy. 

Lily was startled when the bedroom door suddenly opened further. Expecting an adult, she was surprised to see one of the twins. It was mildly embarrassing to her that she still had problems telling Colin and Ray apart. Especially because Dane seemed to have no such trouble. If the twins were next to each other, it was pretty easy - Colin had a rounder face and was a little taller - but apart, Lily still had problems. So she cheated. She'd thin out her shields a little bit and mentally whisper Colin's name. If the twin in question turned, it was Colin, the telepath. If the twin didn't, it was Ray, who was headblind. 

"Pancakes," the twin who ignored the mental whisper announced. He looked curiously at Alex, but didn't say anything. 

"Ray, this is your Uncle Alex," Lily told him. "He's Dane's dad."

"Hi," Ray said, then turned and wandered off. Lily could hear him carrying on one half of a conversation - as much of a conversation as two-year-olds had with each other - as his voice faded down the hallway.

"Jean's eyes, Scott's social skills?" Alex asked, one eyebrow raised in bemused confusion. 

"The twins are..." Lily trailed off, waving her hand vaguely. "They're like the Logan twins were, but worse. At least Nick and Zara talked to other people once in a while. Colin and Ray... most of the time, they're in their own little world and don't feel like sharing."

"He's one of a _set_?" Alex asked with surprise as he got off the bed and went rooting through the chest of drawers for a shirt. 

"Scott didn't tell you? Colin's the other one; he's the actual telepath. Ray's just x-positive." 

Alex chuffed a bitter laugh as he pulled a polo shirt over his head. "We didn't get into any sort of family details," he replied, running his fingers through his hair to settle it down. "I wasn't exactly in the right shape to be updated on kids and pets. Too busy freaking out."

"Are you better now?" Lily asked, trying to keep the concern out of her body language lest Dane pick up too much on it. As it was, he was watching them both carefully.

"I'm pretty much past the fear that I'm not in my home reality," Alex replied, making a face that was too complex to decipher. "I haven't put any sort of thought into... I'm still working on that, I think. Haven't thought too much about the present, the future, what I missed..."

"We'll work on it," she told him, checking Dane's ankle cuff. This was a stressful situation and Dane's control wasn't the best when he was agitated, but he seemed to be holding himself in check for the time being. She honestly wasn't sure how she was doing herself. "We'll handle it."

"We will," Alex agreed. It was as much promise as defiance and Lily felt a surge of pride. And then he came over to her, leaned down, and kissed her forehead. To see his eyes again so close to hers, even if they were bloodshot, had an effect on her and Lily felt her own eyes well up with tears once more. 

"Pancakes now?" Dane asked hopefully, standing up on the bed. Lily laughed and caught Alex's eyes again, this time smiling. Dane's years of people watching paid off in different ways sometimes and his preternatural ability to sense the invisible undercurrents of a situation was occasionally disturbing. Four-year-olds shouldn't be so perceptive, especially when they weren't telepaths. 

Standing up, Dane came up to Alex's shoulder like this and Alex scooped him up in his arms. 

"Pancakes now," he agreed, holding out his free hand to Lily to help her up. She took it and reveled in the warmth. 

"I'm a big boy, Daddy," Dane sighed from his perch. "I can walk."

"Yeah, but I missed out on doing this when you were a baby," Alex replied easily, looking up at him. Lily could hear the slight tremor in his voice. "Indulge me?"

Dane's answer was to put his arms around his father's neck. "Just this time."

"Okay," Alex agreed. "Thank you."

The walk downstairs was filled with anticipation and Lily wondered once more what was going through Alex's mind. Right after Alex had disappeared, at her father's insistence, she had done a lot of reading on shell shock. She understood about not making Alex feel weak for not being able to fit back into the life he had left behind. She knew about not emphasizing the passage of time, but... But. None of the Department of Defense's helpful manuals covered this case...

They could hear Sam's voice as they came to the bottom of the stairs. Lily couldn't make out the words, but he was obviously talking to his children and she could hear Alison and Nate complaining in tandem about something. Alex turned to her, looking past Dane, and for a moment she thought he was panicking. But he smiled back when she smiled at him and he returned his attention to Dane, who was talking about pancakes again.


	24. November 2011

"So how long do we have?"

Scott made a face. "Huh?"

"How long until the XSE has to make an announcement?" Lily fished through the small outer pocket of her backpack for house keys. After it had been decided that they wouldn't be staying overnight in Westchester, Lily had failed to convince Scott that they could take the train home and he had insisted on driving them back to their apartment after an early dinner.

"Oh. Uhhh... Today's Saturday, so I think the best we're going to be able to do is Tuesday morning," he replied, looking at the rearview mirror at the truck double-parking behind him. "It'll give you enough time to tell the important folks, but I don't think it's going to stay out of the news long. There were civilians on the scene; we're gonna have to announce it before it leaks."

Lily looked behind her; Dane was busy introducing Alex to Ivan the Doorman. "We'll deal," she said. "Scott..."

"I know," he interrupted with a smile. "And the hard part hasn't even started yet. Just do me a favor, Lily? Remember that we're here to help? I think we've all realized not to push you, but... How can I say this without pissing you off? Some of us have been where he's been. Nobody's going to argue that the last five years have been a greater hell for you than anyone else, but don't deny Alex anything just because of your pride, okay? You're strong, he's strong, and that's still not going to be enough. Trust me on this."

Lily nodded rather than say anything. She knew Scott was right, but it still stung. And it was better to keep her mouth shut than say anything that she would later regret. Especially as she had been the one so anxious not to stay over in Westchester. 

"It'll work out, Lily. It will," Scott continued, his voice gentler and Lily leaned in a little to hear him over the street noise. "The two of you are too stubborn for there to be any other conclusion... All right. Before I get ticketed. Tell Alex I'll talk to him during the week, okay? And I'll see you next weekend, if not before."

Lily nodded again and kissed his proffered cheek. "I'll be good, don't worry," she promised. 

Scott coughed out a laugh as he turned off the blinkers and rolled up his window. "Famous last words and I love you anyway. 'Night."

Lily watched the car go down the street and then turned back to the apartment building. Ivan greeted her with a smile and she waved to Alex and Dane waiting by the elevator as she stopped off by the rows of mailboxes. Mail retrieved, she shook her head silently as Dane went to town on the call button. 

"They redid the lobby," Alex observed as they entered the elevator. He pushed the button for the fourth floor without hesitation. "It's not puce anymore."

"As if that's a bad thing," Lily replied, hoping her voice sounded more normal to him than it did to her.

"You know where we live?" Dane asked his father curiously as they got off the elevator and walked. 

"Yup," Alex confirmed, hanging back so that Lily could pass by. "I picked out this apartment. With Mommy's help, of course."

"Of course," Lily agreed with a chuckle as she unlocked the door. Alex had come running home waving the flyer and Lily's 'help' had been peeling him off of the ceiling. "But it looks a little different than the last time Daddy saw it, so if you want to show him around a little, I'm sure he wouldn't mind. But put your bag in your room first and dig out your PJs." 

Once inside, Dane tore off in the direction of his bedroom and Alex stood in the foyer and looked around. Lily thought he looked bewildered and tried to squash the panic rising in her stomach.

"Moving was a bitch, I'll have you know," she said quietly, hanging up her coat. Alex didn't need one and hadn't bothered to borrow one. "Nobody would let me do anything and I was too stubborn to give precise directions and too numb to care where things were going. This wasn't your home and I didn't want to live in it without you."

Alex grimaced but Lily was relieved; the lost look was gone. "But you got over it," he said, then frowned and looked at her. "That didn't come out right."

"Probably not," she agreed wryly, crossing the foyer to him and putting her arms around his waist. After a half-second pause, he draped his arm over her shoulders and kissed her forehead. They had hardly been out of contact since the morning. It was as if they went too far apart the other would disappear again. 

"It took me the better part of a year to find everything again after the move," she went on, "and half of that time I was wondering where you would want things to be and if you'd like the way things were set up. I was making myself crazy. And then it all became a moot point. Everything had to be set up according to how it could best accommodate Dane. That's pretty much been the way things have gone while you were away. I'd freak out until I had to do something for Dane. I never got over it, Alex. Never. I wasn't ready to move on. I was very unready. If I hadn't been pregnant when you disappeared, I can pretty much promise you that I'd still be living upstairs and there wouldn't be a damned thing out of place from the day you left."

Alex exhaled loudly. "I'm sorry I left you alone to face all this. You were so unsure about the baby and then..."

"And then I ended up having to raise an electrokinetic baby on my own because his father was rude enough to be the victim of some weird cosmic plot by becoming the Nexus of All Realities," Lily interrupted sourly, pulling away slightly so she could see his face. They hadn't had much of a chance to talk alone all day and she had had time to organize her thoughts. "Don't you dare start apologizing to me, Alex. We are _not_ going to play that game. We are _not_ going to compare scars, we are _not_ going to feel guilty for not having been there for the other, and we are _not_ going to try and figure out who had it worse."

She waited for him to nod agreement and he smiled despite himself. Scott and Jean had tried to keep the day low-stress for him. Nobody had called or stopped by and, with the XSE headquarters already functioning in Manhattan, the mansion had been almost deserted of people who had known Alex. Scott and Jean lived in the boathouse and the mansion's only full-time residents were the Guthries, who were in turn moving into Manhattan after Christmas. Dana had graciously taken over the task of keeping the other children occupied (Dane hadn't left his father's side all day) and Sam had stayed around only for the 'business' conversations. Lily suspected Alex would have been happy to have Sam stay around the whole time - he was the one person who hadn't outwardly changed in the five years Alex had been gone. Nathan had stayed through breakfast but had left shortly thereafter, muttering something about how Alex's story would wait and Domino would not.

"When you're ready to talk about what you went through," Lily went on after she was sure she had Alex's attention again, "then I want to hear all about it. And I'm going to make sure that you know everything there is to know about your son's first four years, right down to the last exploded radio. But it's not a competition. And, quite frankly, I'm pretty sure you're going to win any one we could come up with anyway. We thought we'd get to spend the rest of our lives together and that didn't happen. But we'll deal. Besides, this is not the first time you've shown up having to explain a part of your life that I didn't know you had. And I'm pretty sure I'm going to take this a lot better than I did the news that you were Havok."

Alex made a noise that was part laugh and possibly part sob, but she ignored that part. 

"So instead of just getting Alex Summers, I now have a three-for-one deal instead of a two-for-one. Even if none of your realities taught you how to separate dark colors from light when doing laundry, I will still consider it a bargain."

He sighed and kissed her again, this time finding her lips. "You make everything sound so easy," he said and she could feel his breath against her cheek. 

"I've developed a tendency to oversimplify," she replied with a smile. "Parenthood cultivates such skills. You'll be a whiz in no time. Which is why _you_ are going to explain to Junior where babies come from the next time he asks."

Lily reveled in Alex's embrace as he pulled her tight against him. She hadn't forgotten that Alex was always warm, but she had forgotten how _comfortable_ that warmth was. 

"Speaking of Junior," Alex murmured into her ear. He had been very amused when Dane's name had been explained to him. Rather, he had been amused at Lily's indignation. He thought 'Dane' was a perfectly good name. "Where is the apple of our eyes?"

"Playing in his room," she replied, not really caring if her words were muffled. All day, she had been on alert - watching Alex, watching Dane, watching everyone else lest they upset either one of them. But now, now she could let down her guard. "He's probably figured out that the adults wanted to talk. Dane's good like that."

"I've noticed," Alex replied, a tiny catch in his voice and Lily tightened her arms around him. "Is he always this..."

"Perceptive?" Lily suggested, turning her head so Alex could hear her. "Not always, but enough that he seems very mature for his age. He's always been very aware of his surroundings, so I suppose this sort of follows. He watches everything. Everyone thinks that it's carryover from when his powers were uncontrollable and he couldn't touch anything. The other senses compensating for one that can't be used and all that."

She felt more than heard Alex sigh. "Was it rough for him? He doesn't seem too _affected_ by it. But I've only seen him for a few hours."

"Don't start to brood," Lily warned, kissing his breastbone. "You've pretty much gotten the full Dane experience today. He's... really laid-back. Always has been and, no, I don't know where he picked that up. Not from me. But to answer your question, I think he's always understood that he was different. That he _is_ different. And he just decided that he wasn't going to let that bother him. And it doesn't, except for the incidents."

"Have there been many?"

"Incidents? A few," she answered. "You'll notice the lightning rod-type attachment to the toilet when Dane takes you on your tour. He still has problems there. _Do **not**_ make exploding toilet jokes. Oh, go ahead, you can laugh, but it's not funny to him just yet. He took out a few classmates the other year."

"That's my boy," Alex murmured amusedly. 

"Are you two done yet?" Dane called from what sounded like the doorway to his room. "I finished my book."

"That was a very short book," Lily called back over her shoulder. "And yes, we're done. Why don't you take Daddy on his tour while I go take a shower? Or do you want to take your bath first? Daddy can help you with that."

Dane looked almost tempted and that was enough for Lily. "Why don't you two repair to the big bathroom, I'll take a quick shower in my bathroom, and we'll reconvene in the kitchen? I think we still have animal crackers, right?"

Dane's eyes lit up. Animal crackers were his Achilles heel and had gotten Lily out of many a jam over the years. "Yeah!"

By the time Lily had showered and changed into yoga pants and a t-shirt and headed towards the other bathroom, she could hear Dane and Alex chattering but no water running. Which was pretty impressive because it meant that Dane was already splashing around. When Dane didn't want to get into the bath, he was a master procrastinator and Alex didn't have the experience with his subterfuge to be able to see it right away. But Dane, soapy hair in a shark-fin, was fiddling with his washcloth and Alex was sitting on the toilet lid and father and son looked up with matching expressions when she stuck her head in the doorway. 

"Daddy made the water just right," Dane told her, pointing with a soapy hand at the taps. "It was too hot but he fixed it just by sticking his hand in the water."

"Too _hot_?" Lily asked, thinking Dane had misspoken. Alex could heat up water, not cool it down. But Dane nodded confirmation and Lily looked at Alex, raising one eyebrow. 

"It's one of my new tricks," he explained with a shrug. "Taking heat away is really just the opposite of lending heat and I've always known how to suck up radiation, so it wasn't that big of a theoretical leap."

"So you can make ice cream as well as popcorn?" 

"I'm not that sophisticated with the cooling part," he replied with a frown. "Ice cubes from water in a tray, yes. But I'm not exactly going to put Bobby out of business."

"You can make popcorn?" Dane asked, clearly interested. "Can you make cookies?"

"Not as good as your mother's," Alex told him. "Wash behind your ears."

Upon being reminded of his scheduled tour, Dane finished his bath with minimum fuss and giggled delightedly as his father dried him off with a warmed towel. He fled the bathroom before Lily could entice him into his bathrobe and she called half-heartedly after him about not running around the house naked. Shaking her head, she turned back to Alex.

"So how's fatherhood going?" she asked as he stood to hang up Dane's towel. 

"So far, so good," he replied, leaning over to pull the stopper out of the drain. "It's... different." 

"Then what you expected?" Lily asked as she exited the bathroom, peering down the short hallway towards Dane's room, where she could see him getting into his pajamas. 

"Then the last time," Alex finished, looking almost apologetic when Lily whirled to face him.

"Last time?" She repeated, realization coming to her all at once. "You had a child in one of the other realities?" The idea hurt terribly, that Alex had had his first parental experiences with a child not theirs. 

Alex sighed heavily and rubbed his face with his hands. "They were never _mine_. But except for one, Scotty, I always had to pretend that they were Scotty was some kind of psi and realized straight off the bat."

Lily nodded, but said nothing. There was relief that Alex hadn't fathered children himself (although as much as she didn't want to think about it, Alex had lived dozens of lifetimes and it was ridiculous to expect that he'd have been celibate for all of it), but it still hurt. She wanted Dane to have the best of Alex and that included the freshness of his experiences.

"He felt bad for me," Alex went on, looking at the wall but Lily wasn't sure he could see anything. "He knew that I had a son back in my reality and that I missed him. I wonder how he turned out, if he's happy or even if he's still alive. I don't even know how long it's been since I died in that reality."

Lily had already heard about how Sulven had accidentally told Alex about Dane before he had disappeared. It had gladdened her greatly to know that Alex had carried thoughts of their son throughout his adventures and she tried to focus on that rather than on a replacement son that Alex hadn't seen in lifetimes.

"I'm ready!" Dane announced, charging out of his room. He was wearing his grizzly bear pajamas and the matching furry slippers (Lily had had to put up with Dane scratching her with his 'claws' for days after it had finally gotten cold enough for him to start wearing them) and his hair was sticking straight up. The slippers shuffling along first the carpeting in Dane's room and then the runner in the hallway made for enough static electricity to be a problem for an electrokinetic still learning control.

"Dane, watch your voltage," Lily warned as he skidded to a halt. He rolled his eyes and then closed them in concentration as he willed the electricity into the DCM that still ran through the floors of the apartment.

" _Now_ can we go?" Dane asked plaintively, reaching up to his head to see if his hair was lying flat.

"Lead on," Alex told him with an indulgent smile, the darkness that had clouded his face apparently gone. 

"I'm going to make tea," Lily said as Alex was getting dragged back towards the living room. 

She followed the pair until the living room, at which point she broke to the right to head into the kitchen while Dane dragged Alex straight towards the foyer. Without being able to make out the words, she could follow the progress of Alex and Dane by their voices. By the time they reappeared in the living room, Lily had finished making tea and was pulling photo albums off of the bottom shelf of the bookcase by the television cabinet. There were hundreds of pictures on the computer, but this would be a less overwhelming start.

"Pictures?" Dane asked in the same put-upon voice that he used when he found out they were having chicken for dinner. 

"Don't you want your father to know what you looked like as a baby?" Lily asked, holding out one for Dane to take into the kitchen. 

"I was smaller," he told Alex, but nonetheless took the book. 

"So I'd imagine," Alex replied, pursing his lips to hide his smile and gesturing for Lily to precede him.

Once they sat down to look at the photo albums, Dane at first was more interested in his tea-milk and allotment of animal crackers - especially after Alex was willing to help him try to identify some of the less clearly-defined silhouettes. But he eventually found his way to Alex's lap and thereafter was giving commentary on every picture.

At the conclusion of the second photo album, Lily cleared her throat and pointed out that it was an hour past someone's bedtime. As expected, Dane was extremely reluctant to go to bed. It took fifteen minutes of cajoling and threatening and finally Alex tagging along to get him into the bathroom to brush his teeth and Lily was not about to entertain a similar delay as Dane attempted to prove that he had not, in fact, gotten his bedtime story. Finally, he was in bed with the lights off and Lily closed the door behind him, explaining to Alex that Dane hated sleeping with the door open - he thought his mother needed too many lights and made too much noise. 

"What's the matter?" she asked, noticing the start of tears in Alex's eyes as they went back to the kitchen. It was a silly question - a lot was the matter - but she was sure he'd take it in context. 

"I'm feeling really lucky right now," Alex replied, sitting down at the table. "I've been gone since before he was born. He shouldn't know me from Adam and here I am walking into his life and he's not jealous or suspicious or _anything_. He's..."

"Really happy to finally see his dad," Lily finished, sitting down next to him and taking his warm hands in hers. "He does know you from Adam. He's been hearing about you for as long as he can remember. Especially after a certain incident a few years ago."

Alex looked at her questioningly. 

"You remember earlier when Scott said something to Dane about him having gone off to find you and Dane said that he'd know you no matter what? Did you notice Sam looking all sheepish?"

"I thought it was unrelated," Alex replied.

"Dane got... _confused_ at his second birthday party. It was a joint party at the mansion with Nate and Dane called Sam 'Dada,'" Lily explained, distance making what had been a traumatic moment seem not so much so. Or perhaps it was holding Alex's hands. "I utterly lost it in front of everyone, freaked Dane out - not to mention Nate and even the grownups - and, as best as I can tell, Nathan took Dane off for a nice conversation. Ever since then, he's been curious about you."

Alex nodded, but said nothing. Instead, he let his head hang and Lily wasn't sure if he had his eyes closed or was watching their joined hands. She listened to the quiet - the faint ticking of the clock on the wall, the muffled street noises, the dim sound of another apartment's stereo coming through the slightly opened window by the pantry.

"It's hard," he finally said in a quiet voice. "All of it's hard, but... trying to line up time. It's been almost five years here, fifty-nine months. It all moved forward at the pace it was supposed to..."

"For us, at least," Lily added sourly. 

"And that's the thing," Alex agreed, looking up at her finally. "I stopped trying to keep track of how many years had gone by after the first few realities. Did it go at the same rate? Where was I when Dane was born? Where was I when he learned to talk and walk? Where was I when you moved to Antarctica? I can't even begin to try to figure it out. Every reality, I started at zero hour - the same day, the same year, the same minute. I lost the _meaning_ of time because it went on a Moebius strip."

"Would it have made a difference?" Lily asked thoughtfully. "Would knowing whether you were blowing up a bad guy or eating dinner when Dane was born make much of a difference? You're upset that you weren't here. I'm upset that you weren't here. But it's in the past and we can't change that. I know you would have if you could have and don't think I didn't spend a whole lot of late nights trying to see if I couldn't change that, too."

Alex smiled sadly. 

"I study time for a living," she went on. "I predict the future, at least I try to. And if I could have come up with a way to guarantee that I could punt Sulven or Nathan back to that day and stopped you from doing whatever it was that caused the accident and saved us the last five years of heartache? I would have given up an awful lot to do that." 

"I know," he sighed, dropping his head again. He was quiet for a long moment and Lily waited. "And part of me is so scared that I've come back in such a state that..."

"That I wouldn't want you back?" Lily asked sharply. She pulled her hand free of Alex's and gripped his chin, forcing him to look at her. "Damnit, Alex. I waited _five years_ for you to come back to me. I don't care if I have to hold your fragile psyche together with duct tape. I will _never_ regret that you're home. No matter what happens between us."

He was starting to cry again; at least his eyes were tearing. Lily wiped them away with the back of her fingertips and Alex reached out to grab her hand and bring it to his lips for a kiss.

"I love you," he whispered, his voice rough. "I love you so much. And I hate myself for being so broken. And so scared."

Lily felt her own eyes burn with unshed tears. "I'm scared, too. We've both got so much anticipation. Dane's going to have to be the strong, sane, fearless one."

"He's up for it," Alex said, trying to laugh. 

By unspoken agreement, they took deep breaths and pulled themselves back from the brink of unstoppable tears. They had both spent so much of the day wanting to cry, crying, and trying not to cry and Lily was sure that her eyes were just as bloodshot as Alex's. She gave him a grim smile and a nod and pulled over the third photo album. 

They made it through the album, Lily making decidedly more adult commentary on the pictures now that Dane was asleep and Alex not quite being able to wrap his mind around seeing Piotr and Callisto together, before Alex yawned. It had been an incredibly long day - long couple of days - for him and Lily dropped the teacups into the dishwasher before heading back to the bedroom. 

Alex wasn't there - Lily thought she heard him checking in on Dane - and so she went to brush her teeth. She was changed into pajamas and sitting on the bed by the time he entered the room and she looked up to find him watching her.

"Taking in the view?"

"I... it's not a view I thought I'd ever see again," he replied, shaking off his musings and smiling at her before he headed into the bathroom.

Lily moved into Alex's arms the moment he got into bed. She would be content with just this, just the feeling of Alex next to her. That familiar warmth, the familiar scent, the way they fit together. She was not surprised when Alex tilted her face up to kiss her and slid his hand up her side and from there it just progressed naturally. It was not fairy-tale, explosive lovemaking, the kind of perfection that happened at the end of movies and romance novels. It was a little awkward, a little rushed, a lot out-of-sync and performed with an intensity that would have been frightening in any other context. And when it was over and they had stopped crying, they laughed. 

* * *

He woke up disoriented. As usual. And as he lay still and took stock of the situation and reminded himself that he was in his own bed next to his wife, Alex fought back the pang of... anger? Perhaps frustration... that he was still acting like he was on the run through realities. It was ridiculous to think that all of that conditioning would disappear in one day; that literally lifetimes of training could be undone by a few hours basking in the unconditional love of his son and the ferocity of his wife's devotion. 

The clock said that it was twenty minutes after four in the morning. But despite the fact that he should have been exhausted enough to sleep until noon, he was wide-awake. Feeling too restless to lie in bed, he got up carefully. Lily, asleep on her stomach nearby, barely stirred. She had muttered about having to be restricted to just one side of the bed now that he was back, but she seemed to have adjusted well enough and hadn't kicked him during the night. Which was a blessing - in his half-awake confusement, there was no saying how he might have reacted.

It's going to take time. Scott had told him that. Jean had told him that. Nathan had told him that. And Lily had told him that a few times already. But Alex didn't want it to take time. Not now, when time finally had meaning, when it would go forward and never be recaptured. Before, when time didn't matter because there was always more of it in another reality, he wouldn't have cared. But now? He sighed, ending that train of thought. Welcome to the way the rest of the world lives, Summers. 

He started making a mental list of all the things he'd have to do today and for the next few days, the important things that came even before thinking about the future. Letting people know that he was back, for one thing. The grapevine would have assured that all of the X-types knew already, even if they were obeying Jean's dictum to give him and Lily time and space, but there were other people. Ji-Won and the rest of the gang. Lily hadn't spoken to Orly yet, he knew. Lily had suggested taking a picture of him and sending it in an email to everyone along with a promise to call in short order. She had said that it would be considerate of everyone else and would buy them some time. Alex knew that this was really part of the unspoken plan to keep him from getting overwhelmed. He'd bristled at that plan earlier and Jean had given him that flat stare she used when you were being especially dull-witted and told him that just because he was willing to take on too much at once didn't mean that he _had_ to. Or that they had to let him. But he knew she understood - when she had 'returned' from her entombment in Jamaica Bay, she had been a whirlwind of activity. 

There was also the matter of figuring out who everyone was. Jean and Scott and Lily had made up an X-family tree for him yesterday, one that covered weddings and children and significant others. Alex had been alternately amused and awed as the list had grown; it had seemed a lot of events for five years, but Scott had pointed out that those particular years had coincided with most people's first taste of civilian life and these sorts of things were bound to happen. But they had happened without him. He knew that there was endless amounts of video waiting for him - Dane's early steps, Bobby and Cecilia's wedding, Piotr's award presentation in the New Lands - but... Maybe he'd look at it eventually. Not now.

He walked quietly out of the bedroom and towards the living room. It still felt like he was a guest here, like any unguided looking around that he did was prying, and yet not because everything was familiar in a detached way. The bookcases in the living room had his books as well as Lily's, the furniture, with the exception of the lamps, were all what he and Lily had picked out... seven years ago? No, eight. They had graduated in 2003. Graduated. As in he was technically Doctor Alexander Summers, PhD. It seemed like such a foreign concept. He'd not had a lot of free time over the realities to just sit around and be a geologist. Apparently, he really had broken ranks by quitting the hero business because there had been no other realities where he had been an academic. Always a soldier, even in that one reality where he had nominally had a day job... 

Walking over to the bookshelf, Alex found an earth science textbook. It was the one he had used during his unhappy tenure as junior faculty at Fordham, complete with the multicolored post-its still stuck to the page edges as tabs. He took it back to the couch and turned on the small lamp on the end table. He pulled his feet up under him and began to read.

"There you are."

Alex looked up with a start. Lily, looking very much like she had woken up suddenly to find her just-found husband missing again, was standing behind the loveseat watching him. He made an apologetic face, glancing down to realize just how much of the textbook he had actually gone through. "I couldn't go back to sleep," he said.

Lily nodded, coming around to the front of the loveseat and sitting down on it. "So you decided to read about rocks?"

"Well, rocks and water and geomagnetic forces and... I had forgotten that I was a geologist. That I was a _civilian_. This," he said, holding up the book, "this is a part of my life that was never replicated. And I stopped thinking about it because, well, compared to you and Dane and the _people_ I had left behind, it seemed unimportant and I shouldn't waste brain cells on geomorphology when I should be trying to remember that you like strawberries, like bananas, and hate strawberry-banana anything."

Lily coughed out a laugh, shaking her head. "Of all the things to remember me by..."

"It makes sense after a while, it really does," he assured her. He didn't want to try and explain how it was the minutiae that differentiated people between realities. There was a core of characteristics for each person that transcended every reality, but it was the other details that marked the differences. 

"But..." Lily prompted him and he must have looked confused. "But how do we go from strawberry-banana yogurt back to you reading earth science in the pre-dawn hours?"

The answer hadn't been one that he'd been thinking about, but it seemed obvious once he opened his mouth to speak. "But I think I've realized that what makes me me is _this_. Geology is my strawberry-banana yogurt. I was never a civilian in any other reality. There was no other Alex Summers who had ever tried to explain the identifying characteristics of riverbeds classes to five-dozen disinterested undergrads. No other 'me' had been marching through llama shit in Peru trying to put together a geomorphological survey on a shoestring budget with two guides who kept getting sloshed on local moonshine and gave conflicting directions. I thought it was unimportant at the time, so I forgot it. And now I'm realizing that what I really forgot was myself."

"I'm not sure whether to be pleased or depressed that I got the only Alex who knew that he needed a day job to make himself happy," Lily said with a frown, but then she smiled. "But really, Alex. All that time in grad school living and breathing geology and you just decided that it wasn't a part of you? In favor of _yogurt_?"

"I never said that I was quick on the draw," Alex murmured, smiling. When she said it like that...

Lily shook her head. She got up, walked around the coffee table to the couch and leaned over to kiss his cheek. He shifted his legs in an invitation to sit down, but she shook her head no. 

"Now that my heart is back to beating normally - I nearly screamed when you weren't there on the other half of the bed, 'Lex," she half-growled, "I'm going back to bed."

She kissed him again, letting her hand trail along his arm as she headed back towards the bedroom. 

"Lil?" he called after her and she turned back. "Do we need anything from the market? Is the market even still there?"

"Market's still there," she replied with a smile. "And we could use both kinds of milk. Your wallet is in your nightstand drawer."

Alex got through the derivation of the universal gravitation constant before closing the book and getting up. It was starting to get light out, which at this time of the year and latitude meant that it was six-something. The market was open all the time, at least it had been before. And if not, then he'd walk around and explore the changes that had taken place in the neighborhood. This being the Upper West Side, he was sure they were fairly profound. 

Lily had put out towels for him in their bathroom the night before, so he started the shower and stripped down without thinking too much about it. But once he was thoroughly wet, Alex realized that the only soap and shampoo was Lily's and there was now no chance of either borrowing Dane's or poking around in the linen closet to see where Lily kept the stuff for visitors - he sincerely doubted she made her father wash his hair with baby shampoo when he stayed over. Thankful that Lily's stuff didn't smell too strongly of anything, he mentally added a drugstore run to his excursion. 

It took a few guesses to figure out which drawers in his dresser held which items, but he managed to find what he needed without waking Lily. His shoes - he had borrowed a pair of Scott's size-too-big sneakers yesterday - were in the closet that had been closed all the way and he found his wallet and watch in the nightstand as promised. He hadn't remembered how much money had been in his wallet the day he had left - he hadn't taken it with him to Akkaba - but there were a variety of small bills as well as a twenty, so it didn't look like Lily had bothered to use any of it at any point. He felt a small pang of sorrow as he noticed that she had apparently kept his cards up to date - the ATM and credit cards were current, although he realized that he'd have to renew his driver's license. 

His winter jacket was all the way in the far corner of the front closet and he'd spotted his own set of keys in the drawer in the table in the foyer last night during Dane's tour. They must have been returned to Lily after he'd vanished - Alex remembered he'd had them with him in his bag when he'd left for Akkaba just in case he didn't get teleported straight back to the apartment.

He nodded to the unfamiliar man behind the front desk as he exited the lobby and wondered idly who the man thought he might be. Turning left and heading towards Amsterdam, Alex looked around in the early morning light. The cars were different, although not drastically so. The cafe on the corner was now a Starbucks and two doors down there was a restaurant that Alex was pretty sure hadn't been there before, even if he didn't remember what it would have replaced. It was a Japanese restaurant and Alex made a note to ask Lily if she had been there. 

Before heading to the market, he crossed the street to the big CVS and was relieved to see that it opened at seven even on Sundays. The security guard eyed him lazily as he entered and it took actual willpower to force down his fight-or-flight reflexes and focus his concentration on reading the aisle signs. 'The war is over,' he muttered to himself as he found the shampoo-acceptable-to-men section. He grabbed the house brand of the same stuff he'd always used and went off to investigate soap and toothbrushes. The cashier was too drowsy to do much more than ask if he had a discount card (Alex was pretty sure he did, but he wasn't going to sort through his wallet at present) and he headed back into the late-fall cold.

The market was comforting in its dingy familiarity. This wasn't the place that he and Lily had done most of their shopping, restricting their purchases here to sealed items like cans and containers. He had to laugh once he reached the dairy case - he wasn't sure exactly what the date was, so the expiry dates meant nothing to him. Finding the latest dates and counting on the fact that even Amir's All-Nite Grocery wouldn't stoop to selling post-dated milk, he got a half-gallon each of one-percent and whole. He was tempted to buy grapefruit juice - it wasn't something he had liked before he had left, but it had become an acquired taste a few realities ago - but decided to wait. At the front, he picked up both a _Times_ and a _Post_. A quick check of the date on the front page of the _Post_ confirmed that the milk would still be good for a week.

The doorman looked suspicious even after Alex offered to show his (expired) driver's license with the address on it, but reluctantly let him pass on the premise that he had keys to an apartment in the building. He managed to let himself back into the apartment without too much confusion regarding which key went into which lock - they were newer than the ones in their old apartment. He put the newspapers on the kitchen table and the milk in the fridge before going back to hang up his jacket and take off his shoes. Returning to the kitchen to set about the process of making coffee, he couldn't help the immediate transformation into battle mode when he heard a small crash from the windowsill. Spinning around, hands glowing, Alex was simultaneously surprised to see Dane and nauseated that he'd reacted the way he had in his own home. The irritation with himself turned into something more profoundly painful when he saw the look on Dane's face. Terror.

"I'm sorry," Dane said in a small voice, his hand still on the pepper mill he must have accidentally knocked over. "I just wanted to look outside."

Alex put his now-cooled hands to his face and shook his head. "You don't have to apologize," he said, taking his hands away and looking at Dane. He bent down to pick up the coffee filter he had dropped and went over to his son, thankful that Dane didn't retreat backwards as he approached. "That was all my fault. I should apologize to you. I'm sorry for scaring you."

Dane watched him carefully. "You didn't scare me," he said finally and Alex fought his smile at the little bit of bravado. "Did I scare you?"

Alex sat down in the chair closest to Dane and waved his son over. There was a slight hesitation before Dane approached and Alex hated himself desperately in that moment. He picked his son up and sat him down on his lap. 

"You surprised me," he answered, smoothing Dane's sleep-ruffled hair. "And right now, I'm not real good with surprises. So I guess you scared me in a way. Or maybe I just scared myself. Either way, I shouldn't have reacted like I did. And I'm sorry you had to see it."

Dane frowned thoughtfully. "I don't like surprises, too," he said. "But I don't like to say so. I make things explode sometimes 'cause I can't stop the electricity." His pronunciation of the last word was emphasized; it had undoubtedly been his first long word. 

"I know that feeling," Alex commiserated feelingly and Dane's expression softened a bit as if he could see that his father did, in fact, really understand. Alex wondered, for the umpteenth time in the last twenty-four hours, at his son's capacity to accept him. And while part of him wondered how on earth this stunning compassion had blossomed in a four-year-old, one whose parents were hardly paragons of such, the rest of him didn't care. Why sweat the details when he was being presented with such a precious gift? 

"Did you know about me when you were away?" Dane asked curiously, turning around in Alex's lap to face him.

Alex nodded. "I knew you were here, keeping your mom company. And I worried that I wouldn't ever get a chance to see you. But I did." And the challenge will be to not make you regret it, he silently added. 

Dane leaned against him, looking straight up into his face. His son had a penetrating gaze, Alex mused as he tried to keep still for this up-close inspection. Apparently satisfied, Dane burrowed into his chest, silent approbation that there was no way Dane could have known how badly Alex needed and yet gave anyway. They sat like that, the only noise being the ticking of the clock, until Dane's stomach rumbled loudly and they both giggled.

"How about breakfast?" Alex asked. He had thought Dane had gone back to sleep, but apparently he hadn't. 

"Pancakes?" 

"You had those yesterday," Alex told him with a laugh, kissing his forehead. "How about something else? Cereal? A bagel?"

"Bagel," Dane answered. 

A quick check of the freezer showed no bagels. "Where does Mommy go to get bagels?" he asked Dane, who was sitting in the seat he had vacated.

"Tal's," was the reply. "Can I come?"

Alex smiled. "Sure. But you have to get dressed first," he said, watching Dane immediately climb down from the chair and race off towards his bedroom. He jotted a quick note in case Lily woke up and then followed his son, not quite sure what Dane would consider 'dressed.' 

It wasn't until he saw Dane's surge-protector anklet that he realized that he should have perhaps thought a little more before so readily agreeing. How did he check with his son about the precautions necessary for an electrokinetic's outing?

"Do you need to wear anything special because of your powers?" he finally settled on asking. 

Dane shook his head. "When it's cold, I'm safe," he said simply and Alex was sure that Dane meant that he was safe _to_ others and not _from_ others.

Ten minutes later, Alex was tying Dane's shoes and then following the excited boy over to the front closet, where he was pointing up at his jacket. Alex handed it to him, then watched with barely suppressed mirth as Dane put it on the way he had learned in pre-school - by laying it on the ground with the arms closest to him and then putting his hands in the sleeves and throwing the jacket over his head behind him. It was a production, but it worked. 

"Put your hat and mittens on," Alex told him as he put his own jacket on. 

"You don't have to," Dane pointed out with a frown, attempting the zipper. 

"I don't get cold," Alex told him as he knelt down to help Dane get it started, standing up so that his son could finish zipping himself up. "When you can regulate your own body temperature, you won't have to wear mittens and a hat, either. But for now, put them on."

This time when they passed the doorman at the front desk, there was a double-take as he obviously made the connection between father and son. Dane waved happily to him, but said nothing.

Going out still felt different. With more people out on the street than before, Alex felt like everyone was watching him, like he had a big 'I've just gotten back from an alternate reality' sign on his forehead or some kind of unmistakable marker that designated him as different and that any minute now, someone was going to come along and ask him where he was going with that child. He wasn't used to going _anywhere_ with a child, his or anyone else's - his last stint as a parent had been many lifetimes ago. But Dane was taking it all in stride, chattering about all of the different places he went as they passed them or what Lily had said about this, that, or the other. And so Alex tried to keep up with the conversation and keep an eye on his surroundings. Battle-ready instincts or simple parental paranoia, he wasn't sure. 

In spite of - or perhaps because of - his father's fears, Dane led the way confidently and they returned with bagels and lox and vegetable cream cheese and Alex poured Dane orange juice as he then finally started to make the coffee and suggested that Dane go wake his mother up. 

After breakfast, Alex and Lily sat at the table with their coffee as Dane tried to read the article in the _Post_ about the previous night's Rangers loss. Yes, it was the _Post_ , which probably intentionally wrote in single-syllable words, but Dane was doing fairly well with it, Alex thought, sounding out the longer words and only occasionally asking for help. Dane was indignant when Lily had offered up 'Lecavalier' before he had finished his own attempt.

"So, who do you want to shock first?" Lily asked him after Dane had moved on to the funnies. "Or do you not want to make any calls today?"

Alex thought about it. The mass emailing would be a good idea, but he knew he still did need to talk to everyone eventually. "A few wouldn't hurt, I guess."

"Can I call Diego?" Dane asked. Alex blinked; if he had been told who Diego was, he didn't remember.

"I think we should talk to Piotr and Callisto first," Lily told Dane. She turned to Alex. "Actually, we should talk to them today no matter what. One of them usually picks Dane up from school on Mondays and he stays there until I get off from work. If there's going to be any sort of change in plans, we should let them know."

"Do you want to do it now?" Alex asked, looking at the clock. 

"I don't know if anyone will be home," Lily replied, also looking at the clock. "Piotr and the kids will be in church and Callisto's going to be running errands."

Alex shook his head. "I'm still failing to wrap my mind around the domestication of Callisto, but since when did Piotr go to church?" 

It wasn't that he couldn't see Piotr in a church, religion being the opiate of the Marxist masses notwithstanding, but it was more that it had always seemed like finding faith was one of those things on Piotr's list of wistful longings. Like everything else that Alex had imagined would make Piotr happy if he only let it. Lily had already told him that the changes in Piotr were profound and, without exception, for the better and Alex was very much looking forward to meeting this new, content Piotr.

"He started going with Tania," she explained with a smile. "Tania's Russian by birth - her parents had brought her here in hopes of treatment and then abandoned her when nothing could be done. And Piotr's been very adamant about making sure that she grows up knowing her heritage. Callisto thinks it's just an excuse for Piotr to go native, but she's indulging him. And Diego goes with them because he doesn't want to be left out."

"We don't go to church," Dane observed ruefully. 

"Do you want to?" Alex asked, curious. He hadn't especially thought about matters of faith as they had pertained to his and Lily's offspring. He was a generic WASP and she was a lapsed Catholic raised by a flower child - intentionally ignoring the matter had seemed the prudent choice and Lily hadn't objected.

"Not the one Diego goes to," Dane replied, making a face. "It smells funny."

Incense. Alex nodded. "Well, if you can come up with one you're interested in, let me know."

Lily shook her head in amusement. "If you want to call anyone in the New Lands, you'd probably better do it quickly - it's late evening there. The government types and Kurt already know, no doubt, and Kurt will be back in town on Thursday anyway. But Ji-Won..."

Ji-Won and Kyung, in fact, were not at home. Lily left a message on their answering machine to call them whenever they got in, no matter the hour. The next call was to Sanjay, who was in despite Lily and Alex not thinking they'd catch him. As before, Lily placed the call - they'd thought it too dramatic to have Alex simply calling people up and announcing that he was back from (what everyone tacitly considered to be) the grave. Alex accepted the phone with trepidation - the whole thing still seemed overly dramatic and he was surprised to find himself nervous. But Sanjay's shock and unbridled joy had Alex grinning at the receiver. They spoke briefly - Sanjay was home because Adrian was hosting a lunch for one of his colleague's retirement - and promised to extend the conversation over Skype so that they could actually see each other.

Alex sliced the remaining bagels and put them in freezer bags as Lily talked to Orly. He was only being required to say hello, yes he was well, yes he knew just how much Lily had missed him, yes Dane was a pretty impressive kid, and that Orly would have to join a lost list of people who were going to kill him permanently should he ever disappear like that again. It was heartwarming, in a very embarrassing way, to hear people's reactions to his return. Obviously he had known that he'd be missed, but still. 

Dane, uninterested in phone calls that weren't about him, had gone off to play with his toys and Lily was showering by the time Alex was putting away the remains of the cream cheese. And so all of their plans to avoid being melodramatic went awry when the phone rang before she had emerged. Ji-Won screamed into the phone when she realized whom she was talking to and was soon crying so hard that Kyung had to finish the conversation. After he was done, Alex went in search of Lily so that they could write their email now and avoid a repeat of that scenario. 


	25. November-December 2011

Alex greeted his brother at the door with a quick hug and took his coat. The XSE uniform Scott was wearing looked odd to him with its patches and pins, but then again so did the gray hairs that were starting be noticeable in the right light. 

It had been a good few days. Surprisingly good. The email to everyone had been a relief to send, even if Lily had been insistent upon him including his former supervisors at both the Museum of Natural History and Lamont-Doherty ("You want to be a paid geologist again, right?") on the list. They had had dinner at Piotr and Callisto's on Monday night and Alex had been pleasantly shocked at the 'new' Piotr and his family. Especially Callisto. Privately, Alex took hope from watching Piotr and Callisto. He saw in them a sort of mirror image of himself and Lily, even if it was a funhouse mirror. They had met in a situation that was as idyllic as it was temporary and even misleading, been forced apart by circumstances beyond their control, and yet found the strength to come together again no matter what the scars. If Callisto could do it, so could he. 

"You're home alone?" Scott asked, following him into the kitchen. Alex had left the choice of where to have lunch up to his brother and Scott had suggested eating in, saying that he had enough business-related meals this week that he'd prefer not to spend any additional time in a restaurant that he didn't have to. Alex thought that while that may be true, the real reason was privacy to talk. And that was okay, too.

"Packed 'em off this morning," Alex confirmed as he pulled vegetables out of the fridge. "I'm a big boy now. No babysitter required."

"Why am I not surprised that Lily's not taking more time off for this?" Scott asked, shaking his head and smiling. He opened up the drawer near the sink and pulled out the carrot peeler. Alex frowned at him - he hadn't known it was there. Maybe Scott knew where Lily kept the toolbox hidden - the clothes bar in his closet was loose on one side. 

"I know it's a bit hypocritical to expect Lily to make a big production out of you coming home," Scott went on as he scraped the carrots Alex had handed him. "We certainly haven't done it in the past when anyone else reappears, but... I don't know, you guys have made a point of being different from everyone else."

Alex shrugged. "She's working half-days this week," he explained. He was actually relieved that Lily wasn't home all day. Not that he wasn't happy to spend every moment with her, but he'd quickly realized that he needed his own time. "She tries to leave at one, it ends up being closer to two, but it's good. It's okay. It's maybe even a little necessary. I don't think we need to be around each other 24/7. We'd drive each other crazy. She needs to do her work, maintain some semblance of normal for both herself and for Dane, and I need... I need to figure out what my normal is going to be."

Scott gave him a considering look. "Is this Alex-speak for 'something's not right' or..."

"No, no," Alex cut him off, waving the romaine lettuce. "It's more a case of me being the only one who can sort out what's going on in my head about the past, about my time in other realities. It's ugly and messy and it's got me a lot more screwed up than I want to admit to either myself or anyone else. And when Lily and Dane are around, I distract myself from that because why would I want to look at all of the darkness when I've got them? Does that make sense?"

"Sure," Scott answered, nodding. He pulled the garbage can out from under the sink and dumped the peels into it. "But I'm still going to remind you of what I remind Lily constantly - you don't have to do it alone. Even the stuff that happened when you were off being the Nexus of All Realities. Just remember that Jean and I have done the whole 'go sometime else and be someone else and then come back and try to pretend that you're the same person' thing. If either of us can help you, then let us. It probably wouldn't do either of us any harm to talk about it, either."

Alex nodded and pulled the large knife out of the holder and put down the cutting board. "I had sorta forgotten about that."

"I haven't," Scott said darkly. "It's actually getting easier as time passes. The one good thing about getting older, I guess. The discrepancy isn't as big. It's still there - I'm still fifty-five in a forty-three year-old's body - but I don't have to pretend as much. I'm _supposed_ to be wizened and mature now. It's not like it was before, when everyone thought I was just broody and solemn because while I was thirty-seven in my head, I was twenty-five as far as everyone else was concerned and that's not how twenty-five year-olds act. At least Jean understood. I don't know what I would have done if she hadn't. Not that I'd wish what happened to us on her, but..."

"I think Lily's going into this with eyes wide open," Alex said, resuming cutting the cucumber into chunky slices. He felt a little sheepish - he had been one of those people who thought Scott was just broody and introverted and it had never dawned on him that Scott was acting his mental age and not his physical one. But he knew Scott wasn't telling him that to chastise him. "She comes from a military family. Her grandfather was in Korea, her dad's been in a whole whack of bad places. This isn't a foreign concept to her, even if the specifics are decidely weirder than anything she might've seen in the past."

There were times when he thought Lily was trying to drag them all, him especially, to safety and happiness by sheer force of will alone. There were times when he could see her fighting her own frustration and irritation -- Alex had put something in the wrong place, he'd forgotten some piece of information he'd been told, his tastes had changed over the lifetimes and her attempt to anticipate his needs or wants came out badly -- and biting her tongue when he knew that once upon a time, they'd have fought. It was weird and uncomfortable and it made him feel alternately fragile because he wasn't getting things as quickly as he felt he should or he'd forgotten something that he thought he shouldn't have but also resentful of being considered fragile because he disliked having this weakness on display. He disliked needing help as much as he did. Lily's absences kept him from reaching the point where he took that frustration out on her. 

"She's strong and she's stubborn and she's still the best person to help you through this," Scott agred, turning on the water to wash the celery and the pepper. "But one last bit of wisdom learned the hard way: Don't be untrue to yourself just to make everyone else feel better. This isn't just a random 'oh, look, the X-Men got thrown around by an evil telepath and acted out their darkest fears' sort of thing where you want to wash your brain out with a Brillo pad and then you go around looking sheepish because you still remember what you did until it fades from memory in time for the next crisis."

Scott paused to turn off the water and gently bang the wet celery against the rim of the sink. "You've been through an awesome, terrifying experience and it has changed you profoundly in ways I don't think any of us really understand yet. Especially you. And so while this isn't a license to go all Dark Havok on us, don't be afraid to be who you are now just because you're not sure everyone - or even just Lily - is going to like who that is."

It was sound advice, as befitting his brother, but Alex couldn't help but wonder if Scott would say the same thing if he truly understood exactly what his little brother had had to become to survive. 

They fell into a companionable silence, Scott finishing making the salad and Alex making an omelet out of the 'fake eggs,' as Dane called the egg-white stuff. Alex found it all a little weird - pleasantly weird, but still weird. He and Scott had never quite managed the buddy thing. They had tried, but while they were both willing, different lives, different teams, different goals, different _everythings_ had always stood in the way. It had been true across all of the realities that Alex had been in where Scott had been alive and present - there had been a tension between them that could never be overcome. And the depressing thing was that almost every time it was Alex who was mostly to blame. Sure, some of the Scotts could get a little sanctimonious and some of them had been outright evil, and Alex hadn't run across a version of himself who wasn't a bit of a hair-trigger, but it still seemed a little... pointless. 

"Are you ruminating or brooding?" Scott asked as he set the table. 

"Ruminating," Alex replied, not bothering to put the omelet on a serving platter and just cutting it in half in the pan. "I only brood between eight-thirty and ten in the mornings. I was just thinking about all the different relationships I had with the different Scotts in the other realities."

"Uh-oh," Scott murmured, but he looked thoughtful as he sat down. "And where do we fit in?"

"High end," Alex told him, sliding the omelet halves onto his and Scott's plates. "I mean, at least now. We seem to be uniquely able to piss each other off no matter what reality we're in - and for the record, our powers don't work against each other no matter what plane of existence we're on. But we had stopped _trying_ in most of them. At least where we were together and on the same side." 

"There were times where we weren't?" Scott asked dryly, serving himself salad. 

"It only makes sense," Alex said, smirking at his brother's sarcasm. "Probability theory in action, all of the different permutations possible. We've seen it bleed over here, although I don't think any of us ever examined it too closely. Dark Beast and all that - doesn't Kurt have that story about an evil version of himself?"

"Dark Bamf and he gets huffy every time Kitty -- _Kate_ \-- tries to tell that story," Scott confirmed.

"And I guess you could even through in some of the other stuff that's happened," Alex went on, trying not to think about what a Dark Bamf must have looked like. "Like the reality where Nate Grey came from. Or even what happened with the Siege Perilous. Same players, different roles. Every one of us is guaranteed at least one reality where we're evil and one where we're good. Simple mathematics."

"What about the rest?" Scott asked. "I mean, wouldn't it be weird if we had the only reality where someone was a certain way? Like we got the only evil Blob or the only good Bobby in all of existence..."

"We didn't," Alex told him, choosing not to elaborate. "As for the rest? I had a few working theories, but nothing beyond the hypothesis stage. In terms of nature versus nurture, it's a killer philosophical debate even if it's flawed. It's like the whole Joseph-Magneto thing - close enough to be tantalizing, but not exactly right."

Scott chewed thoughtfully. "I have to admit to being impressed. You've become a lot more... reflective."

"I had a lot of time to think," Alex replied with a frown. "About a lot of things. Especially about the person I am and how there are parts of me that I really, really don't like. It's kind of hard to stay in denial about your own faults when you see them repeated over and over and over again. Once is okay, twice is suspicious, but after that, it's time to take the hint. There were some real shits out there with my name and my face, you know?"

"Worse than Genoshan Magistrate Summers?" Scott asked meaningfully. 

"Magistrate Summers had nothing on them," Alex answered with a disgusted shake of his head. "Magistrate Summers was a bastard and he was up front about it. Nothing devious, no false fronts, no secret betrayals. I've come to appreciate honesty, no matter how ugly it may be, in a way that I don't think I ever had before. It was one of my most important lessons learned."

"Surely it wasn't all bad," Scott pointed out. "There had to be a few realities where you could be proud of the man whose boots you were filling."

"There were," Alex admitted. "But fewer than I'd have liked. After a while, it started to bother me how few and I started to make more of an effort to learn from the mistakes that the Alexes had made before I got there. I hope that I became a better person as I moved on through realities."

"It would have to be almost impossible not to, slow on the draw though you may occasionally be."

Scott was grinning when he said that and Alex grinned right back at him. 

"It was like this weird sort of race," he said, swallowing a bit of egg. "Every reality I moved on to, I'd try to make myself better, but at the same time, I knew I was losing something else that was just as important. Hope, I guess it was. Faith, maybe - the ability to believe that I was operating towards a higher principle and not just getting flung from reality to reality like a penny through the economy. But my losses were starting to outstrip my gains. You saw what I was like when I got here. I was fried. I had pretty much given up the idea that the pseudo-karma ladder had a nirvana at the top and wasn't really a Moebius strip or something. I don't know how much longer I would have been able to go on."

"You would have managed," Scott assured him. "If only out of stubbornness."

Alex shook his head ruefully. "I'm not sure. In the beginning, I waited each reality out - I figured out how to fit in, did my best to be the good soldier and to undo some of the messes the real Alex had made at least to the point where I could live his life without being embarrassed, and went on until I got killed fighting the good fight. Knowing you're not going to stay dead does tend to make you a little reckless in battle."

"Talk to Logan about that," Scott chuckled. "But it also gives you the bravery to try long-shots that just might win the day."

"That, too," Alex agreed with a wry smile that faded. "But the longer it went on, the more realities I moved on to, the less patient I got. I never got to the point where I dropped in, looked around, didn't like what I saw, and killed myself to try the next one, but... I was getting very close to that point. I was definitely past the point where I'd take any real precautions for my own safety.

"I got more tired more quickly in each reality. It took more and more willpower to dredge up the energy to fix _this_ Alex's messes enough to be comfortable in his skin. It got harder to remember that I was there to learn and receive as well as do and then die. And everything that reminded me of this reality? I started to hate those things. The closer a reality was to this one, the faster I wanted to die and get out of it."

Alex paused, waiting for Scott's reaction to that bit of disclosure. 

"That's why Jean knocked you out when you first started talking to us," Scott told him, grim understanding in his eyes. "She was terrified that you were going to kill yourself and end up tossing yourself back into that cycle."

Alex shook his head, still slightly awed by how _out of it_ he had been, by how far he had fallen. "I owe her for it."

"Bull," Scott snorted, chasing an errant carrot piece across his plate. "Get yourself straightened out here and now and she'll consider you two even."

"Working on it," Alex promised as he swallowed. 

"Should I ask how the plan for that's going or have you had enough interrogation for one meal?"

"It's getting better," Alex answered, pausing to pick a piece of lettuce out of the bowl. "Well, most of the time. I hate scaring Lily and especially Dane."

"Have you?"

"Yeah," he admitted, not wanting to look at Scott just then and focusing on his salad instead. "I know it's not my fault per se, but I'm getting really, really tired of having to tell myself that the war is over. Knowing that it's going to take time doesn't make me more patient. And I can't help but feel that the longer it takes me to deal with the past, the harder the present and the future is going to be - I'll never catch up and I don't want to lose any more time."

Scott chuckled to himself and Alex watched him, knowing that his brother wasn't laughing at him. "I'm trying to decide whether Nathan is an object lesson or not."

Alex shook his head. "I guess going away as a baby and coming back a middle-aged man when he should be a toddler does sort of qualify."

"Hell, that's the easy, straight-forward part," Scott said, wiping his mouth with his napkin. "I was more thinking about the 'focusing on the past at the exclusion of the present' part. But he was on a mission, more or less, until Akkaba and you... you're finished. Right?"

"For now," Alex sighed. "I don't know what happens if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, though. I could end up back on the merry-go-round. I've tried not to think too much about it. Apart from the whole 'roaming realities for all eternity with no rest' possibility... I mean, should I tell Lily that next time, she doesn't have to wait for me? Do I leave standing orders in case I get to pop back a second time? Do I set up a bank account in case I don't return until Dane's grandkids are our age?"

"I see what you mean," Scott mused. "Good idea. Don't think about it."

Alex blinked, then barked out a laugh. "And they put you in charge when you give advice like that?"

"Perquisite of nepotism," Scott replied with a nod. His smile faded, however, as he caught sight of the clock on the wall. "And that's all of the advice you're getting this lunchtime. I have to get back before Sulven decides to invade some small sovereign state as part of a training drill. Again. I'm big cheese at the office today and if I'm not there to say that she can't, she's going to take my silence as tacit permission."

Alex smiled as he stood up. There were some things that had not changed in five years. 

"Don't laugh," Scott told him. "We've already had to send Sam over to the UN once to make apologies to the Security Council's subcommittee for a different incident and the Ambassador from Liberia sent us a Braille map of the world after Sulven's last rotation in charge of training exercises. Official recognition is not all it's cracked up to be."

"Thank you for reminding me of why I want to be a civilian when I grow up," Alex said, waving Scott away from any attempt to clear the table. 

"Do you?" Scott asked as they headed back towards the foyer and Alex retrieved his coat. "If you've spent all those lifetimes in battle, are you fried or...? I'm talking about down the road here, mind you, not next week. You've always had pretty good command skills and if you've finally gotten comfortable about using them..."

"I'll see," Alex replied honestly. It was something that had crossed his mind in a last-resort kind of way. "I've picked up a few new tricks since last you saw me as Havok and I'm kind of curious to test them out, but not in any formal capacity. I won't sit idly by and watch you march to your deaths, but I don't see myself wanting to join the XSE anytime soon."

"All right," Scott nodded, looking as if he hadn't expected any other answer. "I guess I'll see you Saturday, then, although do me a favor and call me before then?"

"Yes, Dad," Alex groaned, then paused. "Speaking of Dad..."

"We've been trying," Scott told him with a resigned sigh. It was the 'why do I always have to be the one who has to deal with Corsair' sigh and Alex never tired of it. "They're probably on the run and cloaking."

"Do you think it's time we mentioned the 'R' word to him?" he asked, leaning forward to whisper conspiratorially. "The man is sixty-nine. Running around the galaxy being a pirate has got to be getting a little tiring by now. Besides, he's got a passel of grandsons to spoil now. And I'm pretty sure the twins and Dane will be more receptive than Nathan ever was. Has he even seen his grandkids?"

"Yeah. Stopped by for Christmas the year before last," Scott told him with a roll of his eyes. "Brought toys, got pissy with me when I suggested that he spend some time on Earth and relax, and promised to visit again before anyone graduated kindergarten. The kids love him, but the only joy _I_ got out of it was watching your father-in-law mutter about Air Force weaklings."

"Way to go, Admiral Beck," Alex chuckled. He'd spoken to his in-laws, both of them, already. The conversation with his father-in-law had been both enlightening and surprisingly heartening. Alex had half-expected him to be angry with Alex for abandoning his daughter, but instead they had talked about returning home from warfronts and the struggle to get adjusted and the offer to hook him up with the Department of Defense's extensive recovery network. Alex was actually looking forward to the next conversation. 

He had thought a lot about his own father during his travels and could honestly say that he had no especial insight after all of his ruminations. His father had good intentions, but just wasn't prepared to make significant concessions to build a solid relationship with his sons. It wasn't the same thing as him and Scott not wanting to join the Starjammers - they had gone with him for a while, but in the time since Corsair had never taken time out of his adventures to be Christopher Summers. And Alex, recently reunited with his wife and son, couldn't fathom why not. 

A cell phone chirped and Scott whimpered. "They've found me. I can't run, I can't hide."

"Do what I did," Alex told him as Scott headed out the door. "Forget the phone in distant countries."

"Sulven would invade to get it back."

* * *

"Lily?"

She looked up, surprised. Normally she could tell when Tom was hovering over her desk. "Yes?"

"Vinnie Gupta's group is ready to give their report. He offered to give you an advance copy of the notes," Tom said, eying her closely. "You never got back to him on whether or not you wanted it."

"Oh," she replied, shaking her head. "I could have sworn I told him yes. He doesn't have anyone there who can speak in non-geek terms and I was going to prepare a crib sheet for the XSE briefing. That's still scheduled for tomorrow, right?"

One of the XSE clairvoyants had been getting regular visions of blood-covered walls and Nathan had brought Midday Sun in to try to get to the bottom of the situation after he himself had started to feel unwell. After all this time, Lily didn't understand why he didn't want anyone else to know that he had a connection to the timestream - it seemed like a fairly important bit of information. Of course, this was the same man who had neglected to identify himself to his own parents for more than a decade.

"Yes," Tom agreed, frowning. "I'll make sure it gets done today. Are you feeling all right? With all due respect, you look like crap."

Lily snorted. "Funny, that's how I feel."

"Dane pick up something from school?" Tom asked. "You have that 'I didn't sleep' look about you."

"Dane's fine," she replied. In fact, he was chipper and cheerful and had not helped his mother's headache as he had chattered all the way to nursery school. 

"Ah."

Alex, on the other hand, was not well. Had not been well for a couple of days. Nights, rather. The first time, he had muttered something about reliving some of his more gruesome deaths and he had eventually been able to go back to sleep. The second night, he had refused to say anything when Lily had shaken him awake and had gone into the shower and stayed there long enough that Lily had fallen back asleep by the time he had emerged. (She hadn't meant to.) Last night, she had woken up to his screaming, but he had pulled away from her when she had tried to touch him and hadn't said a word to her when she had followed him into the kitchen. She had sat with him for ten minutes in the silence before he had gotten up and gone into the living room. When she had tried to follow him there, he had snapped at her to leave him alone (in less polite terms) and she had gone back to bed where she had eventually cried herself to sleep. How much of that was the actual situation and how much of it was her hormones being completely out of whack with her having gone back on the Pill (they didn't need _that_ particular complication just yet), she wasn't sure. This morning, he had been his usual goofy self with Dane but hadn't said a word to her. 

"If you want to take the day," Tom offered, "We can cover..."

"No," Lily replied, a little sharper than she had intended. "You've been covering for three weeks now. I need to start pulling my own weight here again."

The first week after Alex had returned, Lily had left at lunch and spent the afternoons with him. But as Alex had stopped looking quite so lost and had started focusing his energy on getting himself back up to speed, Lily had started to bring work home and, after a week of the two of them working in separate rooms in the house, Alex had pointed out that she might as well be at the office. He was comfortable playing househusband - picking Dane up either from school or from his after-school hockey practices and taking care of dinner - and Lily saw no real reason not to return to work. 

And so this week she had been back to hoping to leave the office at five and getting out closer to six... to return to her increasingly distant husband and her increasingly tension-filled home. She was sure Dane was picking up on things, which only made her feel worse - what was going on was between her and Alex, although really she thought it was between Alex and Alex - and Dane shouldn't be involved one way or the other. But he was. He was being especially clingy and playing in his room far less often than he used to, instead bringing out his toys and books into the living room. Playing buffer. And it galled Lily that he was doing this and she hoped it galled Alex as well. Dane deserved better.

"Lily, you're pulling more than your weight right now. What's happening at home..."

"Stays at home," she cut him off firmly. "I appreciate the concern, Tom, I really do. But my personal life has no place in this office. Not as gossip and not as an excuse why I'm the head of this department and haven't a fucking clue as to what half of the people here are up to right now. I know you've all been really helpful, but the help I need right now is to get back into things. I'm no less of a control freak than I was last month and I am twitching with the knowledge that there are projects being started and completed here that I was never told about because they were considered too low level to bother me with. I want to be bothered with them now. _Especially_ with this weird XSE stuff they handed us."

Tom sighed. "Fine. We'll play it your way. I'll get everyone to barf up an update and have Louisa prepare a summary of all ongoing research for you. But I'm warning you: I'm not going to go through the trouble of helping you overload your plate just so you can crack under the strain."

He turned and stalked away. Lily sighed and slid her chair over to her keyboard and brought up the departmental instant messenger program and sent him a one-word message: thanks.

While she was at the computer, she switched over to her email program and wrote out a quick note to Alex. He was using Lily's old one and she knew he checked his email during the day. If he wouldn't talk to her, then maybe he'd read her mail. By the time she was finished with her five paragraphs, tears were running down her face. But even as she wiped them away, she felt worlds better. It was off her shoulders now. 

Before noon, an email with a list of summaries and updates of everyone's current projects arrived courtesy of Louisa, the office manager/Lily's secretary. There were three items on the list that Lily had never seen before, but none of them looked either important enough or interesting enough for her to bother with at present. She was surprised to see that Ahearn hadn't gotten the daily updates from the New Lands yet, but she'd wait until after lunch to press Miri to get in contact with Eddie Kim down there. 

Lunch was spent across the street in Bryant Park watching the skating rink. She had taken Dane to skate around the previous week and he was already begging to go again.

At three-thirty, Vinnie Gupta and his trio of fluid flow specialists gave their presentation to Lily, Tom, and the eight other fluid dynamics experts. It was lovely in its conciseness, in the elegance of the mathematics, and in its novel way of interpreting what was currently one of the most unreadable of the low-amplitude distortion effects. It was also completely incomprehensible to anyone without at least a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and Tom muttered something about Martian-to-English translation services on his way out of the conference room. 

Lily followed behind, rolling her neck as she walked. Two aspirin taken with cold coffee wasn't going to do much for her stomach, but it would ease the throbbing of her head that had begun in the middle of Vinnie's spiel. The bright lights of the office - natural light from outside combined with some sort of pseudo-solar light - were making it worse and Lily walked looking down, only picking her head up when Tom suddenly stopped talking in mid-sentence. 

Was the fact that Alex was sitting in her cubicle a good thing or a bad thing? 

Probably a good thing as it was highly unlikely that he had bothered to come to her office in order to continue to ignore her. But after that, she'd lost the ability to tell.

He was sitting at the small conference table in her cubicle, head down reading a book. Lily smiled at the scene almost involuntarily. He looked so... normal. Cute. Like how she'd find him in the library back at Princeton, or curled up on the couch at home. The way he tilted his head ever so slightly depending on whether he was reading the left page or the right, the familiar posture that she'd know from a distance. Nothing like how she was used to seeing him now, brow furrowed with the effort of keeping himself together. Not like he had spent lifetimes in different hells and no longer quite recognized that this wasn't one of them. 

She hadn't asked him anything about his time away. Not specifics, at any rate. He volunteered information periodically, but if he was uncomfortable, there was no point in making it more so. She knew he spoke of those things to Scott and, on occasion, to Piotr. And, presumably, the details came up in the thrice-weekly sessions with the retired Navy shrink (who specialized in treating combat veterans) whom her father had somehow gotten Alex to see. But the two of them talked about other things. Dane. The history of the last five years that Alex had missed out on - presidential elections, movies, who had won the Stanley Cup. Anything but that. 

"Hi," she said as she entered her cubicle, putting her notepad down on her desk. This was definitely a moment she wished there was any sort of privacy in her cubicle. Short walls, even topped by the spider plants and ivy that had spread through the office like wildfire, did not hide anything. At least Alice Epstein was visiting her family in New Zealand for the holidays, so the cubicle directly to one side was empty. Lily had staked out prime real estate - her cubicle was in the last row before the couches and coffee table that stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows - and with the de facto lounge empty, that was about as private as it got. So much for keeping her personal life at home.

"Hi," he replied sheepishly, putting his bookmark into his book and putting the book on the table. "I wanted to apologize..." he trailed off, frowning deeply. 

"Alex," Lily sighed, sitting down in the chair next to his. "You don't have..."

"I do," he cut her off, waving his hand. "I do have to apologize. I've been a complete and utter shit to you and that has nothing to do with where my head is or what I've been through. You don't deserve to have me taking my frustration out on you. You haven't done anything wrong and I'm making you the target. I'm pissed off at myself, not you."

"You shouldn't be pissed off at yourself, either," Lily told him, raising her eyebrows meaningfully. Alex gave her that 'everyone says so and I don't care' look he had and she shook her head in resignation. When she was a child, she and her grandfather had used to watch G.I. Joe cartoons together and every episode had ended with a mini morality play that culminated in 'And knowing is half the battle.' Well, it was the unimportant half of the battle, she thought now. Alex knew that he shouldn't be angry with anyone, knew that his recovery would take time, but that didn't help. She was hurting, he was hurting, _Dane_ was hurting, and knowing what the problem was didn't make it go away.

In her peripheral vision, Lily could see Tom waving people away from her desk. "I think we should probably have this conversation elsewhere," she told Alex, tilting her head slightly towards the rest of the office. "You have been the subject of idle speculation for three weeks and now that we've proven that you do, in fact, exist, I think it's time we both disappeared."

Alex nodded and Lily turned away before she could see the apologetic look on his face. She was starting to get sick of his always apologizing for 'intruding' on her life, for upsetting the routine she had settled into and breaking up the pattern of hers and Dane's lives. He was a part of their lives, damnit. Yes, he should be sorry for taking his own problems out on them, but after that? It pissed her off. And it scared her - the man who had disappeared from her life five years ago next week had traipsed unapologetically through her life, had never seemed bashful or tentative or uncertain about being a part of whatever she did. The old Alex had unashamedly kissed her senseless picking her up from end-of-the-week office hours, not caring if the students down the hall were hers or not. The new Alex was sure that she was ashamed of his coming to work.

"I was a busy boy today," he said with obviously false cheer as she pulled together paperwork and saved files to disk to take home. "I went to my head-shrinker, who reminded me that if shell shock were really treatable in three weeks then he'd had been out of business years ago. I went to the XSE tower, where Scott yelled at me for being too much like Nathan and thinking that if I just pretended that I wasn't affected by what happened then I would be perfectly functional. I picked up Dane from school, and he was the most dangerous of the bunch because all he had to do was make a face at me and demand to know why I was being so mean to his mommy..." the façade crumbled then. "I am so sorry, Lily. For treating you like crap. For letting you down."

"For crying out loud," she hissed quietly, turning around to face him and not caring about the surreptitious looks that were undoubtedly being drawn from around the office. "Stop apologizing to me. Just stop. Unless you've decided to give up trying to get your head together, then you haven't let me down. You won't let me down. If you're gonna make me your stress toy, then yeah, you can apologize. Other than that, I don't want to hear 'I'm sorry' come out of your mouth. Okay?"

Alex closed his eyes, nodded, and said nothing. Lily finished packing her backpack and crossed the cubicle to get her coat. "Where is Dane?"

"At Kurt and Amanda's," Alex replied, sounding subdued. Lily turned to look at him and he gave her this bright, 'posing for a school picture' kind of demented grin as if to say 'look, I'm not apologizing' and she was forced to shake her head at him. In return, the artificially goofy grin settled into his own naturally goofy one and Lily breathed a sigh of relief. "We worked out a deal - he'd spend the night there and I'd spend the night with you trying to work things out. And he made it sound like it was a great sacrifice on his part to go make cookies with Amanda and sing Sesame Street's entire repertoire with Kurt, so I'd better live up to my half of the bargain..."

Lily smiled at him and gestured for him to precede her out of her cubicle area. A silent nod to Tom was all it took to assure things were okay at the office. She knew Tom would put a lid on the gossip that would swell up the minute the elevator doors closed behind her and Alex.

Alex waited until they were outside on the bustle of Forty-Second Street before speaking. "I haven't been handling the wait well."

The crossed the street and went towards Bryant Park by unspoken agreement. The sun was setting and the lights of the Christmas display were already on. They sat down on two of the delicate-looking yet surprisingly sturdy chairs that were scattered throughout the park even in cold weather. 

"I thought you were doing a respectable job of it until this week," Lily replied, adjusting her coat so that the wind wouldn't blow into it. The darkness had brought a chill that hadn't been around earlier. Alex frowned at her, giving her that 'why are you freezing when I'm a walking heater' look that she used to get back when they were dating and she was still hesitant to make use of his powers, and she moved her chair closer to his, nearly tipping it over as she tried to slide it along the loose quartz gravel. 

"You didn't go back to work full time until this week," Alex replied once she was settled close enough so that he could put his arm around her shoulders and pull her against his chest.

This time it was her turn to frown at him. "Since I find it impossible to believe that you've developed an aversion to women in the workplace during your travels..."

"It's not that you're working," Alex began with a groan. "Well it is. Sort of, but not in that 'why aren't you home taking care of me' way. It's a combination of things. That I'm _not_ working. That I'm not even close to working. That I not only have to beg your indulgence while I get my head on straight and wander around like a wraith, but also that I live at your largesse. In so many ways. I'm frustrated with my own dependence upon you."

"Alex," Lily sighed, shaking her head even as she was leaning against him. "Remember those little words we repeated to each other eight years ago next month? That whole 'for better or worse, richer and poorer' stuff?"

"I know, I know, it's totally irrational. But it's still there and it's still frustrating. So fine, I'm not worried that you're going to toss my butt out on the street, but it's still... I feel so _useless_ and helpless and dependent. I've improved to the point where there are whole stretches of time where I don't feel broken, when I feel so close to normal that it starts to bother me that I'm sitting around. And those are the moments when I just feel like an extra piece of your puzzle. The extra button they give you on a shirt, just in case."

Lily pulled away from Alex so that she could see his face. How could he not see how important he was to her? Did she not do something right? Did her attempts to get him acclimated by immersion backfire? "Extraneous? You think you're extraneous? Like I've spent the last five years waiting for someone _else_? Breaking down and crying because I miss someone _else_?" 

"No," Alex admitted, running his hands over his face and rubbing fiercely at his eyes. "It's... I don't doubt for a heartbeat that you didn't miss me, Lily. Not for a nanosecond. I _know_ you did. It's in everything you do, everything you've done since I came back. It's in the way that Dane knows so much about me. I _know_ all that. And if it was possible for me to love you any more because of it, I would."

"But?"

"But you have a life," he said with a shrug. "You built a life for yourself and for Dane where I don't have a natural place except as a shadow, an absence. And that's what you had to do, so I'm not upset or anything like that. But you've built my lack of presence into your life and I'm not sure where to fit in now that I'm here. My presence isn't the same shape as my absence.

"Everything I do has to come out of your life, your routine. It's you making all of the compromise, all of the sacrifice, to fit me in. _That_ is what I mean about living at your largesse. Even things I try to do to help out - like picking up Dane from school - messes with the way you had things set up and moving smoothly before I showed up... That's why I've been such a bastard this week. Frustration with myself coupled with realizing just how much you are already shouldering and I'm adding to it."

Lily shivered as a gust of wind whipped past them, feeling the cold air burn her cheeks, but refused Alex's offer for more shelter and warmth. She needed to face him for this. 

"Did it ever dawn on you that I was okay with you being an _interruption_?" she asked, sounding sharper than she intended. Partially she was frustrated with Alex, but mostly it was fear talking. She wasn't sure if he was wallowing in self-pity or whether she had forced these feelings of inadequacy upon him. She had survived his absence by going strong and going alone. What if she wasn't able to make the compromise after all this time? "That maybe I'd welcome you throwing monkeys into the clockwork?"

"In the abstract, yeah," Alex admitted, looking slightly chastened and even more saddened. "But day-to-day, when you're sneaking off to check your email because you want to make sure whatever's going on at work is functioning well in your absence, when I have to call you to ask you questions about where things are even though you've already told me. Even when I want to take a load off you, I still have to ask you if can I do this, that, or the other with Dane because I don't know about what he can or can't do. I feel more like a burden than a welcome interruption. Because I'm not changing things for the better right now, I'm just one more responsibility you have."

She started to protest, but Alex waved her silent. 

"And even if it's one you want, it feeds right back into my own fear. That I'm too broken. That I'm not getting better any faster because I _can't_ get any better. I'm going to be that porcelain Paddington Bear you probably still have stashed away somewhere - it's all cracked and broken and someone Crazy-Glued it back together so that it's in one piece and you love it dearly, but it's still _broken_ and you won't throw it out because once upon a time it meant the world to you. Either that, or you're going to start to resent me and I don't want to be either of those things to you."

"You won't be," she said quietly. Determinedly. Paddington Bear was on the top shelf in Dane's room, dusty with disuse and there only because, as Alex knew, she didn't have the heart to toss it out even if all it was now was a relic of a time in her life long past. That wasn't going to be Alex.  "You can't be."

"I don't want you to have to give up what you've earned just so you can carve a place for me," Alex went on after a pause to let a mother and her two small children pass by. "I am so proud of what you've accomplished. Do you know that? Whether or not it could have or would have happened with me being here - and I don't think it would have - but I am so proud of you. And even if you didn't hate me for dragging you down, _I_ would hate me for dragging you down. Because you're brilliant, Lily, and the world is just starting to realize it."

She could blame the cold wind for the tears in her eyes, but that would be lying. "I don't like what I paid for it," she said quietly. "The lab? The work? The hash tag on Twitter? It's less about being brilliant and more just grief and fear and anger put toward something other than self-destruction."

"That's--"

"Oversimplifying?" Lily cut him off. "I have a great career, true, but I have no life. Do you remember how many Engineering Job Fairs I went to back in grad school? None. I never wanted to work in an office where I'd be expected to run a staff and do paperwork and have to answer emails and texts on my phone all day every day. And yet here I am, coopted into the family business neither of us wanted to be a part of because I was too scared to make any big changes in my life in case you came back and couldn't find me. Believe me, Alex, I'm not very broken up about making changes for your benefit."

Alex watched her and waited. 

"You're my fun half, remember?" she went on. "And this is what I turn into when you're not here to temper me. I don't think it's very pretty, Alex. I work eighty hours a week, I spend as much time with Dane as I can so that I don't feel completely lousy that I dump him off on other people all day, and that leaves me enough time to keep food in the house and sleep once in a while. I barely get to see anyone except for birthdays and weddings. This is _not_ the life I want. I won't deny that I'm fascinated and energized and all those other good words by what I do at work. I love it. I really, really do. But I love other things, too. I love _you_."

She reached out for Alex's hands, feeling their warmth through her gloves. 

"Ten years ago, we had this same conversation, you remember?" she asked and he tilted his head, looking thoughtful and confused. "You were talking about giving up being Havok - or at least cutting back severely on being Havok - because there were other things you wanted to do. Like spend time with me. And after I got over the whole 'Alex is Havok' stuff, I felt crappy because Havok was this hero who did all these amazing things and saved all these people and here I was taking him away from that. Because I knew you had let Scott drag you off a lot more often before we had hooked up than after. And you had told me that the X-Men had no lives and no hobbies and no outside friends and you were sick of that existence anyway, but I still felt lousy. And then I realized that you really were happy, that going to grad school and being with me made you happy. And the rest of the X-Men and X-Factor managed to save lives without you... Shoe's on the other foot. I trusted you then. You have to trust me now."

Alex made a face as if he was going to protest, but nodded and then smiled. "Would it shock to hear that my headshrinker is of the firm belief that you and I keep too much to ourselves?"

No, it would not. Because when Lily had, at Scott's and her father's joint urging, gone to her own session with said headshrinker, he'd said much the same thing. "So how about we make a deal -- more day to day communication and less dramatic unburdenings of mind and soul in public parks?"

Alex's smile was more genuine and more wry. "Deal," he agreed. "But since we're already here... We are footloose and child-free. Why don't we make the best of that situation?"

The best of the situation ended up being dinner at a Brazilian restaurant a few blocks away, where they enjoyed steaks and caipirinhas and managed to talk easily. Lily thought that it felt like a date almost, or at least like the dates they had gone on after they had been a couple for a while. They were back to getting to know each other again, Lily realized, a process made harder by both of them trying to pretend that everything was just the same. 

With Lily having work the next day, they didn't make too late a night of it. Once they were home and sleep loomed, Lily watched Alex carefully. He noticed and assured her that while he hoped that he'd actually be able to sleep through the night, if he didn't he promised to be a lot better behaved. He also admitted that the doctor had given him a prescription for sleeping pills that he didn't want to fill. A drug-induced sleep would not necessarily be nightmare free and he didn't want to be trapped in narcotic-influenced terror. 

It turned out to be a moot point. Exhausted as they both were, it felt to Lily that no sooner had she turned off the bedside lamp than the alarm went off signaling a new day. If Alex had gotten up during the night, she had no idea. He said that he hadn't and she would take him at his word.


	26. December 2011 - January 2012

"I so don't miss this part."

"Getting the tree?"

"Yeah. It's such a hassle."

"I'm the one carrying the tree."

"And I'll appreciate that you smell nice and piney later."

"You didn't get a tree when I was away?"

"I got a tree. I didn't _get_ the tree, but I had a tree. Piotr used to bring it up when we were living here."

"Do they do Christmas in the New Lands? Or is it summer there and you go to the beach or something."

"We did Christmas. And it was summer there. It was easier to get a tree in the New Lands. Hydroponics. We'd just push the tree inside. Come January, we'd push it back outside."

"That's so... artificial."

"A fake tree is artificial. This was a real tree that didn't die and drop needles and could be suspended high enough off the ground that certain little electrokinetics couldn't play with the lights."

"Hey!"

"Hey yourself, Junior. I was on a first-name basis with the guy at the Home Depot who ran the Christmas lights section because of you."

"That was when I was a baby."

"Oh, yeah. Like you haven't been trying to sneak into the closet to get to the lights for the past three weeks."

"Daddy! You told! You said you wouldn't!"

"I didn't say a word, Dane. Your mom's just got keen powers of observation."

"What's that mean?"

"It means that I know your father doesn't need to put the phone book on top of a chair to get to the shelf in the front closet."

"..."

"I told you to put the phone book back when you were done with it, Dane."

"..."

"He asked for the phone book? You let him have it?"

"I wanted to see what he'd do with it."

"Did he get close?"

"Not really. We've got a couple more years."

"That's a relief."

* * *

"... And that's it?"

Lily leaned back in her chair and sighed heavily, closing her eyes and taking off her glasses. She had had them a week and had not gotten used to them yet. "Yes, Nathan, that's it."

The meeting had not been her idea, but Nathan had insisted. She had said that they wouldn't have anything she'd be willing to use as hard data for at least another two weeks, but he had fairly demanded that he be shown what they _did_ have. So she, Tom, Miri Ahearn, and Alice Epstein had spent the morning winnowing out what they hoped was the more outrageous of the current working theories before ordering in from the bagel place on 43rd and then hopping on the 1 train down to the Tower. 

"So what you've got is..."

"A wide variety of possibilities, Commander Summers," Tom cut him off and Lily smiled. The other three were still in awe of the XSE headquarters, the exterior that loomed high over West Street and the sleek interiors. Not to mention the uniformed personnel and air of importance. They could be deferential. She herself was too... jaded. Well, not jaded, but she wasn't about to get all googly-eyed because her brother-in-law walked by in his dress uniform and her nephew was trying to intimidate her subordinates into making assertions they shouldn't be making. 

"What we're looking at," Tom went on mildly, "is obviously big. It's at least a Class Three nexus point, but I don't think you need us to tell you that. We're comfortable saying that it's an isolated event and not a sequence, but whatever it is is simply too far in the future for us to narrow down that scope at this moment. That our precogs are so affected speaks to its severity, not to its imminence."

Nathan looked like he was going to protest further and Lily shifted in her seat, moving from her casual slouch to one of command. "Tom, why don't you and Miri and Alice wait outside for a moment? I'll join you in a second. I'm sure we're done here and that Commander Summers is grateful for us having taking time out of our pressing schedules to deliver in person the breakings news that we have nothing hard and fast to go on."

Nathan's eye glowed, but he nodded curtly to the other three, who wisely murmured their farewells and closed the door behind them.

"Don't start with me, Nathan," Lily warned him as she leaned down to pick up the backpack that had slid from where she had leaned it against her chair. "I have been telling you for a _month_ that we weren't going to have anything. I told you this morning, when I tried to cancel this dog-and-pony show. I tried to tell you two weeks ago, when you set it up over my objections. I even told you at Christmas over the din of our children playing with their new-gotten goods. I don't know what you were hoping to do here by dragging us all down here, but getting blood out of stones wasn't going to be one of them."

"I... didn't sleep last night," Nathan replied quietly. Lily was about to retort to that, but one look at his face told her not to. He wasn't looking at her, he was looking _through_ her. And the intent, focused expression that he had worn throughout the meeting had faded to something closer to a pallor. "It's not the first time. The dreams that the precogs are getting... Whatever this is, Lily, it is not something we have seen before. It isn't a political coup or a tidal wave. It's something new and something dangerous and I _don't_ know what it is and the harder I try, the more elusive it gets. And what slips from my grasp is on a scale that I don't think we have adequately considered. I don't care who I piss off along the way. I _cannot_ let us go towards this unprepared."

Lily took a deep breath before nodding. As _annoying_ as the man could be, it was so hard to stay angry with him at times like this. He had the weight of the universe on his shoulders, the fate of the world literally in his hands. And no matter how big the XSE oligarchy got, Nathan still sucked at delegating. 

"I know, Nate. I do. But I'm not talking about ruffling feathers or power trips. I know you well enough, at least in terms of _this_ ," she said emphatically but quietly. She waited until he was looking _at_ her again. "But the pressure you're putting on us is not the good kind of pressure. What you're doing is making us rush and that makes us overlook things and then draw hasty conclusions which are _wrong_ conclusions. What we're doing right now, you know as well as I do that if we miss something small now, we could end up past the point of recovery. I know you're trying to help us get a fresh perspective, but all you're doing is distracting us. I swear that you'll be the first to know if we get even a really good hint of an idea. But don't make me drag my top people down here before then, okay?"

Nathan nodded, a concession without apology. "Alex is here, by the way."

Lily cocked her head at the non sequitur. "Oh?" 

For most of the last month, Alex had been reliving his graduate school days. He gotten back in contact with his former graduate advisor, John Frohmeyer, and was now trying to relearn in six weeks what it had taken him six years to get down the first time. He had been commuting down to Princeton once or twice a week for meetings with Frohmeyer and, with Princeton's finals-after-Christmas policy, was taking advantage of the cram courses and special labs run for the undergraduates. Between that and his weekly 'shrink-rapping' and his determination to take care of Dane, Alex was running himself ragged. But he was also happier than he'd been at any point since his return, so, for now, Lily just watched. The nightmares came much less frequently and the moments during the day where Alex seemed to be anywhere-but-there were now rare and, for that, Lily would put up put up with much more than a coffee table covered in hydrology surveys.

"He's running through a training session," Nathan elaborated, looking much more like himself and making Lily wonder if that pale ghost had been all in her mind or not. 

Lily allowed herself to look as surprised as she felt. "Who put him up to it?" she asked. "He wouldn't have volunteered by himself."

If there was a lingering shadow over Alex's life, it was in his steadfast refusal to let anyone see him use his powers for anything destructive. He and Dane would make a joke out of him regulating the temperature of Dane's nightly bath and Lily had seen the results of what must be some greatly improved fine control over his plasma rays, but that was it. Alex wouldn't even show her what he had done to fix the slight warp in the kitchen window - he had simply wiggled his fingers at her when she had asked him how. He had also reacted badly at dinner the other week when Scott had suggested a Danger Room session, so Lily couldn't imagine why he'd be running a training session here... 

"It was a sudden decision," Nathan replied, standing up. "And it was all his. Why don't we go downstairs and you can watch..."

This was all getting too suspicious. "What are you not telling me, Nathan?"

"Scott can explain," he said, looking over his desk before coming around to the front of it and holding out an arm to guide Lily to the door. 

"I don't want Scott to explain," Lily growled, ducking away from his hand and hoping that her anger would carry her over the surging wave of panic. What could have happened that Alex would have come _here_? "I want you to tell me what the hell is going on and _then_ I can get Scott to fill in the details. Start with why you didn't tell me before?"

She watched Nathan's face, waiting for the decision to be rendered. Finally, he spoke. "He had some kind of episode, probably a flashback, when he picked up Dane from preschool. That's all I know."

It was a terribly sparse explanation, one that did not ease her growing fears, but she knew she wasn't getting anything else out of Nathan and let herself be guided towards the door. If anything serious had happened to one or the other, Nathan would have said something earlier, no matter how preoccupied he was about the timestream. Snapping her professional mask back in place, she exchanged nods with Nathan and went over to where Tom, Miri, and Alice were sitting and waiting. 

"Okay, the good news is that I think I've gotten the Evil Overlord off of our back for a little bit," she began as they turned to her. "He understands that looking at us like we're bugs under a microscope doesn't make us work any better, it just makes us look like bugs."

Alice, the only one of the three who had been with the Network since before Akkaba, snorted and the other two smiled. 

"The better news is that you three get to go back to work without me," she went on, "For reasons that don't involve our project, so don't get nervous. It's nothing life threatening, or at least as life threatening as what we're working on, so don't worry, either."

"Will you be back up later?" Tom asked and Lily tried to miss the concerned look in his eyes. "I called in; the stats from Midnight are already waiting and Rob wants to start on them."

Lily frowned as she checked her watch. "It's... four-fifteen. I really doubt I'm getting back today. Rob knows he can start without the whole rigmarole; tell the man to show some damned initiative, willya?" She smiled to take the edge off of her words. Rob Anazole was a brilliant statistician who could see five steps ahead of everyone else, but he wouldn't run a single number until he'd gotten supervisor approval. "All right. Anything blows up, call maintenance. Anything interesting happens, my cell is, unfortunately, on. I shall see you folks on the morrow. Good work in there, by the way."

Smiling farewell, she waved and turned back to where Nathan was waiting for her. The trip to the floor with the training rooms was brief and nobody they passed looked at them twice; Nathan was who he was and Lily wore an ID card that demonstrated her permanent clearance to be in the building.  Which was just as well; she wasn't sure how long her patience with delays would last.

The passed through a nondescript metal door into a control booth that only had a cursory resemblance to the Danger Room console back at the mansion-turned-Academy. The console itself was on a small dais, forming nearly a complete circle around the command chair. It had small monitors, sensors, and seemingly thousands of controls that Lily had appropriately oohed and aahed about during the building's construction but couldn't care less about at the moment. The rest of the room had computer screens, printers, and a mainframe against the back wall while the front was comprised entirely of windows that started at the ceiling and ended only a few feet off the floor. 

An anonymous petty officer was manning the controls and both Scott and Logan were looking through the glass, matching grim expressions on their faces. 

"All right, now will someone _please_ tell me what the hell is going on?" Lily asked. "Alex has flashbacked before and none of them sent him scurrying here."

Scott turned to face her, but Logan, while he turned his head slightly in her direction, kept his eyes straight ahead. Whatever was going on down below was commanding his concentration. 

"I don't know much more than Nathan must have told you," Scott said. He was apologetic, but at the same time all business. This was Field Commander Scott Summers, not the man who had argued with her last week about canned corn. His shoulders were straight, his posture stiff, and he didn't smile. "Alex wasn't very forthcoming. He said he'd explain afterwards."

Lily shook her head and let loose a strangled cry of frustration. "He has bitten your head off every single time you've suggested any sort of training exercise at the Academy, but when he suddenly shows up at XSE Headquarters and demands to be thrown into a simulation, you just hand him a uniform and say 'set to'? You didn't even ask _why_?"

"It's not afterwards yet," Logan said from the window. He was standing in a watchful pose as he looked down. "We owe him that much."

"You both _owe_ him the good sense to make sure he's not having a fucking episode before you..." she broke off with a heavy sigh, pacing in a direction that would not bring her close enough to where Scott could intercept her. "Did you at least check to make sure he knew where he was before you told him to go have fun?"

"Give us a little credit, Lily," Scott half-growled, half-sighed as he caught her glare. "He was lucid. Freaked out, but lucid."

A muttered curse from Logan broke the stare-down and they both looked to the window where he was shaking his head in what seemed to be awe. Nathan was standing behind him and walked back to give a direction to the controller that Lily couldn't hear. 

"Where the hell did he learn _that_?" Logan asked nobody in particular as Scott reached for Lily's elbow and half-dragged her towards the window. "Jurgenson, give me a south-west wind at five miles an hour focused on the A4 quadrant. Increase it by five every thirty seconds until I tell you to stop."

Lily wasn't prepared for what she saw below. She had seen Alex in an XSE uniform, right before he had disappeared and the final model had just been approved. But the man in the scored battle armor holding back a volley of bullets and other projectile weapons with only a translucent wall of plasma was not who she remembered. When he turned around, his face was not a mask of concentration but was instead void of expression. He barely even looked like Havok. At least any Havok she had ever seen. And that was both the problem and the point, wasn't it.

"Oh my god," she whispered as she watched. The scene below was one of nighttime urban warfare; the scattered and destroyed remains of cars, mailboxes, people, and retail merchandise littered wet streets. Fires burned where gasoline had pooled in potholes and the sounds of war filled the air, coming through the control room speakers in surround-sound stereo after Logan flicked a switch by his left hand. 

"He went straight for the advanced level," Scott said quietly by her right ear. He was standing closer to her than he otherwise would have, perhaps sensing her shock. "I _did_ try to talk him out of it, but I couldn't."

On some level Lily understood that this was necessary. Not only for Alex, who had so obviously been fighting this aspect of himself, but also for the others, like Scott and Logan, to get some sort of tangible evidence of just how _much_ he had changed. She knew he felt like he was living a lie, one he had to maintain lest he _revolt_ everyone with the monster he was half-certain he'd become. So this was part confession for him and, for that, Lily held her tongue. But it was hard to watch, so very hard to see so much pain coursing just beneath the coldly expert surface. 

Below, the wind Logan had ordered increased, but the wall of plasma didn't waver and Alex was focused on using a pinpoint beam emanating from his left index fingertip to successively knock out the three locks on a door fifteen feet away from him. 

"He's cruising through it like it was the freshman trainee obstacle course," Scott went on in the same quiet voice. Lily could hear the bitterness, the self-accusation that she had rarely had cause to hear from him. "At the top of his game, back when he was leading X-Factor, he could have run this program and he wouldn't have gotten a quarter as far as he has. Look at what he's doing - he never could do laser precision at that distance, let alone with his left hand. He's not even melting down the whole lock, just the tumblers. He was never very good at minimizing the cosmetic damage and now he's improvising credible camouflage."

Lily could only shake her head and cover her gaping mouth with her hand. 

"The plasma shield is translucent enough for him to see through, but it's holding up to... twenty mile-per-hour winds and he's _not even paying attention_." Scott was talking as much for himself as for her, Lily realized. Punishment for not seeing the profundity of the changes earlier, perhaps. She wasn't party to most of what went on between the brothers, but she had been under the impression that Alex was talking to Scott about things he hadn't yet said to her. Maybe that wasn't the case after all, or maybe Alex just wasn't sharing this with anyone. "He's been at this for half-an-hour and it's been like this the whole time. No fatalities, but he's gotten a helluva lot less squeamish about creating enemy casualties. And his use of his powers? We knew he'd learned some new tricks, but the scope of them is almost frightening."

"Imagine how he must feel," Lily muttered sourly. Scott's personal guilt aside, he was still Commander Summers and she didn't want the XSE looking at her husband, who was doing this out of _fear_ , and seeing a brand new favorite weapon. These shiny new skills had come at a cost that she knew Alex had thought too steep to pay. They had been acquired through barter and Lily feared the price had been part of his soul. 

From the control room, they could watch the scene unfold from on high; the ceilings Alex could see being invisible to them. They watched him shield himself from the unseen attackers as he ran across the street and dove through the door he had unlocked, kicking it shut behind him as he came out of his roll. He moved through the house, past the scared 'civilians' in the kitchen, and through the back door and into an alley. Down the alley, diving across another patrolled street, and down a block before another firefight. This time, the five attackers were in dim light and Alex put up his shield with one hand and melted their guns from under their fingers with the other.

"Everything's different," Logan said in rueful awe. "He _runs_ differently now. Used to try and teach him stuff, but... It's like he's suddenly learned everything I ever showed him 'n' more. He's not afraid to open up the throttle anymore."

"Don't you get it?" Lily asked, too saddened by what she was seeing to even be angry. Her voice came out a whisper. "It's not sudden at all to him. It may have taken dozens of different Logans in dozens of different lifetimes to teach him what he's doing now."

A small plasma blast set off a fire in the engine block of a parked jeep that was painted with the insignia of what was presumably the enemy. Alex was around the corner and into the next alley before the owners of the jeep emerged from the building next to where it was parked, brandishing weapons and shouting. 

"We get it and we don't," Scott told her. "He doesn't tell us any more than he tells you, Lily. I don't even think he tells us half of what he tells you. He won't talk about where he was, how long he was in any reality, even how many realities he was in. I don't even know if _he_ knows."

"He knows," she said quietly, closing her eyes to keep the tears that were welling from falling. "He can't forget. He tries, but it keeps coming back. He puts so much energy into looking normal. He thinks that just because I don't see him jump when one of the neighbors slams a door, it'll mean that I think he's all better. He just wants everyone to think he's better. So that maybe he'll have an easier time convincing himself."

At the end of the day, Alex was always so tired. He'd pretend that it was simply too much reading and too much running around with Dane, but Lily knew it was more than that. Keeping up the mask of normalcy took a lot of energy. No matter how many times she tried to tell him otherwise, she knew he was still convinced that he had to get completely healed before he could feel safe in his old life. And while a part of him knew that 'completely healed' didn't mean 'the way he used to be' and would probably never be really possible, Alex wasn't going to settle for scar tissue. And Lily wasn't sure if she was doing harm or good by not doing more on that front, even if every time she brought it up they ended up arguing.

"Jurgenson, run Endgame Protocol Nine," Logan ordered. "We've seen enough."

A dead end appeared at the far side of the alley Alex was about to turn into. The lighting was nonexistent and he wouldn't be able to see the brick wall until he was halfway down the alley, by which point the armored car driving nearly silently from the other direction could pull in and corner him. 

"Whatever means of escape he can come up with will bring him outside the program," Scott explained. 

The scene unfolded as planned, but did not end as expected. 

"Nobody's ever tried to commandeer the car before," Jurgenson offered helplessly as Logan glared at him. 

The bombed-out city faded and Alex stood alone in a vast, green walled room and Lily watched with a critical eye, looking for any and every sign. He stood with his head held high, but his eyes closed and his pose was still tense, coiled and ready to spring into action once more. He was breathing deeply but evenly, exhausted but still prepared to go on. 

Lily watched his hands clench tightly and flex in a slow rhythm. Something was wrong. 

 "It's over," the sensitive microphones could pick up his hoarse whisper. "It's over. It's over."

"Get me down there," she said, not turning around. 

"He's just..."

"Get me down there now," she repeated angrily, the waver in her voice betraying her. "Or I kick out the window and jump."

A hitched gasp came through the speakers as Scott entered a code into a keypad along the near wall. A door Lily hadn't seen before slid open and a staircase was revealed. 

"It'll open at the other end when you get there," Scott told her and she ran.

It did and she stopped two strides into the room, letting Alex see her first before she startled him. She was immune to Dane's powers, not his.

He had spun to face the door the moment it had slid open, but he didn't see her, she could tell. He was caught between the Alex who had just strolled through one of the XSE's hardest training programs and the Alex he thought he had to be with her. And he was lost somewhere in the middle.

Finally, his face registered her presence and she stormed towards him, not sure if she was more angry or afraid.  She stopped right in front of him and before she could express either emotion, Alex gave her the most complex, heartbreaking look. It was the grim-set jaw of this newfound warrior, and it was the hopeful eyes of the husband who had tried to convince her that having a baby would be the neatest adventure ever. And then it crumbled, followed by the man who bore it. 

She got her arms around him before he went totally boneless and eased them both to their knees. She was crying, but he was crying harder and she could hear great gasps by her ear as he sucked in air. He was trembling - shaking, really - and he held her loosely, letting her be strong for him. 

She wasn't sure how long they were there before he was able to collect himself enough to breathe normally again. His grip around her tightened and she heard him take a deep breath before he shifted his weight back to himself and pulled away far enough so that he could look at her. His eyes were bloodshot, probably had been from before with all of the smoke, and before she could warn him not to apologize, because that's what he always did when he broke down like that, he kissed her. Fiercely and unapologetically. 

"I had to," he said breathlessly as he pulled away again. "I had to do this."

"Why?" A despairing whisper.

"I..." he broke off with a sigh and bowed his head. Lily frowned and cupped his chin, making him look at her again. 

"I had a vision," he said. "Not a flashback, nothing I had ever seen before. It... It was..."

"Enough to send you running here," she finished for him and he nodded, making a sorrowful face. 

"It felt like _here_." 

Lily knew what he meant. Not this building, but this _reality_. And a pang of fear ran through her that maybe Alex knew something about what was going on in the time stream, that maybe he was tuned in to the same wavelength that Nathan was. She wasn't afraid for the future, whatever that event might be. That event was going to be bad and scary and probably cost lives and it would be a tragedy in and of itself. Instead, she was afraid for Alex, afraid that the horrors of his past that he was so far unable to move past would now be compounded by his being haunted by horrors of futures yet to happen. 

Chronography was artificial precognition and Lily had always felt that that was both blessing and curse. It was a curse in that the purely manufactured nature of chronography gave it an extra layer that had to be penetrated to reach the truth - reading the time stream was a learned response, not intuition or instinct. It was a blessing, however, in that it kept the burden of success and failure impersonal - they mourned each missed opportunity to prevent loss, but they didn't have to live with it within their skin the way a precog did. The way she was starting to worry that Alex might and was sure that Nathan did.

"I felt so unprepared," he went on, his eyes looking unfocused again. Or, rather, focused on something only he could see. Lily, scientist, skeptic, and concerned wife, didn't like it at all. "I know if it happens, I'm going to be needed and...I wasn't ready. I need to be ready..."

"You don't need to be ready for anything," she interrupted, squeezing his chin gently so that he'd look up at her and not at the floor. "That's what the XSE is for. You have other things to worry about."

Alex shook his head, pulling away from her grasp. "No," he whispered. His eyes were closed, but when he opened them, they weren't unfocused or wild. They were perfectly clear and full of resolve. "I have to worry about this, too. I've... I've seen too many worlds fall, Lily. I can't let another one. Not _this_ one."

"Well, it ain't gonna if we have anything to say about it."

Lily jumped at the voice behind her and she felt Alex start as well. Turning around, she saw Logan, looking... inscrutable. Like he knew that he looked gruff enough in the uniform without having to try and couldn't bring himself to look uncomfortable for interrupting an intimate moment. 

"Now that you've set a record score on the program," he went on, voice softening, "Why dontcha hit the showers so we can pick your brain? You've got a lot of explainin' to do, 'Lex."

The last line came out half-muffled, as if Logan had wanted to say something else but hadn't. It was also the man talking, not the uniform. The one who had gotten the two of them dosed up with bubonic plague on a Mexican vacation, not the cool evaluator who had been standing at the observation window.

Of all of the X-people who had been close to Alex, Logan was probably the one person Lily had learned the least about during Alex's absence. At least directly. Both Piotr and Kurt had, at separate points, told her that she was being 'Loganesque' in her determination to go it alone. And they hadn't meant it as a compliment. But she knew Logan well enough to know that Alex's disappearance had hit him hard and the changes Alex had gone through before his return were hitting him harder. In no small part because Logan, like everyone else, wasn't sure how to deal with the 'new' Alex. The 'old' Alex had mellowed into someone fairly open about his own strengths and weaknesses, cheerfullywearing both an arrogance and an insecurity that had been honed in battle and in rest. Since his return, however, Alex had been opaque about who he had become and Logan was unsure of how to proceed with his old friend, understanding that the old responses were no longer accurate or even appropriate but not knowing what else to do. And Lily felt for him - for both of them - because of that.

"Lots of practice," Alex muttered, a dark smile flashing over his features. He grunted as he launched himself back to his feet from his knees and held out a hand to Lily. 

A half-hour later, she and a freshly-washed-and-back-in-street-clothes Alex joined Scott, Logan, and Nathan in Scott's office. While waiting for Alex to change, Lily had called Piotr, where Dane had been brought after Alex's episode (which still hadn't been explained to anyone). Piotr reported that Dane had been upset at more than his father's sudden lack of composure, but hadn't said anything when pressed on the matter. Currently he was doing something loud with Diego that had Callisto threatening them with housecleaning chores, but he would be welcome to stay as long as they needed him to. Lily could hear the concern in Piotr's voice and wished she had something more to say to him other than what little she knew. 

Over coffee, Alex - now eerily calm and businesslike - explained that he had been having a perfectly normal day, first at the New York Public's Research Library and then at Staples, and then he had gone to pick up Dane from preschool. Dane had seemed a little out of sorts, but Alex hadn't been able to get anything out of him other than his possibly having had a nightmare during his nap. He wasn't running low on electricity, which had been Alex's first thought since Dane was still getting adjusted to Reed's new model of the control device. It had been sunny and warm for January, so they had wandered around a little rather than go straight home and had split an apple purchased at an open-air market. The vision had hit, oddly enough, when he was washing Dane's hands with the water from his water bottle. He felt like he had blacked out, but Dane said he hadn't. The vision itself, once explained in fragmented pieces, was both horrifying and horrifyingly vague. He had seen En Sabah Nur, but not the one Nathan had destroyed at Akkaba. And it had been raining blood. Alex's voice stayed steady throughout, but his eyes teared in either frustration or disgust at what he saw and was unable to relate clearly.

"I've had... not _this_ , but things like this happen before," Alex finished quietly. "It's not true precognition. It may not be any sort of precognition. I'm not sure what it is. It could be that I see things that could happen in this reality or are happening in another one. I don't know, But I've certainly never had such a strong sense of... _probability_ like this before. Or a connection to what I saw being in this reality."  

Nathan put down his coffee cup and leaned forward. "Was Dane ever tested for precognition?"

Lily frowned as she untucked her leg from underneath her. She was unsurprised that Nathan had honed straight in on the possibility of precognition - especially with some of the fragmentary images bearing a loose resemblance to some of the XSE precogs' own visions - but didn't see what Dane had to do with things. 

"No," she replied, letting the confusion color her voice. "Sulven told Alex that Dane was headblind before he was born and he's never shown any signs of anything. Besides, it doesn't run in the family."

"I don't think Dane had anything to do with it. It's a quirk of being the Nexus," Alex added bitterly and Lily squeezed his hand in silent support. 

Nathan looked thoughtful, however, and Lily knew he wasn't going to drop things. 

"I'll keep it in mind," she told him before he could say anything. "But I'm also going to keep in mind that Alex is an expert in realities in general, not in this one in particular. No matter how sharp the feelings."

Nathan frowned but nodded and said nothing else. They had already had this discussion today. 

* * *

Lily watched Alex stare into space for a few moments before interrupting his reverie. 

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Alex looked up at her as if he were surprised to see her. His good humor had more or less been a show for Dane, so she had let him be after they'd put their pride and joy to bed an hour ago. Since then, he had been working furiously at his laptop, typing occasionally but mostly it had been the frustrated, solitary jabs at keys that Lily associated from her own experience with 'page down' and 'open/close document' and 'delete'. 

He sighed in frustration and leaned back, rubbing his hands over his face and pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes. "I guess. I don't know."

"Now there's a definitive answer," she retorted, crossing the living room to sit next to him on the couch. Alex shrugged helplessly and tiredly and she patted his thigh. This had been a terribly long day for him, she realized. And yet he had still summoned the energy not only to care for Dane, but also to convince their son that his father really was okay. If only she were as easy to convince.

They had gotten to Piotr and Callisto's at almost seven. The discussion had been necessarily brief - the children would be needing to get ready for bed soon and Alex was really too drained to go through another interrogation and Piotr had sensed such. Callisto had been in a surprisingly _approving_ mood. Lily had told Piotr what Alex had done in the training room when she had called and presumably he had told Callisto, but why that had garnered the reaction from her that it did, Lily was at a loss to explain. Piotr and Alex had made plans to have lunch tomorrow and then she and Alex had taken Dane, who had been positively protective of Alex, home. 

"I'm feeling very... stupid," Alex said finally, turning his head from where it lay against the couch cushions to face her. "I've made a mistake that I have no real reason to have made."

Lily raised her eyebrow in silent exhortation to explain, but said nothing. More than two months into the process, they were finally learning each other's tendencies. If Alex was prone to apologizing for that which wasn't his fault, she was apparently too willing to give forgiveness for any weakness on his part. So they had a deal - he stopped saying 'I'm sorry' and she stopped saying 'it's not your fault' and they moved on to whatever the problem actually was. 

"It didn't really hit me until Dane and I were most of the way to Piotr and Callisto's," he went on, frowning at himself. "I had simply thought to go there to be... safe, I guess. Indoors from the storm in the figurative sense. But we were on the subway and I was thinking about what I was going to tell them and it did hit me. I've been running again."

"From?" 

"Myself," he replied with a disgusted snort. "I tried to stop being Havok again. And it didn't work any better than last time. It worked worse than last time because _this_ time, being Havok means a whole lot more. Ever since I've been back, I've been pretending that I could go back to being the old Alex. And maybe I can, at least in terms of being a geologist and being your husband and learning how to be Dane's father and all that stuff that I missed so badly when I was gone. But what I _can't_ do is go back to being the old Havok, even if Havok doesn't exist per se anymore. I can't go back to treating being a hero as some weird family business that I've inherited the rights to even if it's not what I want to do with my life. I've seen and done and _been_ too much to be as... casual about it anymore."

Lily nodded, understanding the gist of what he was saying even as she was sure she was missing some essential other point that was where his insight was. "You tell all this to the Commander?"

Alex chuckled darkly. "The good doctor has been telling me as much since the start. I've been trying to pretend that I'm not Havok anymore and he's been trying to tell me that I can't pretend that that part of me doesn't exist, that it's not simply a matter of present and past. And I didn't want to hear that, so I went on my merry way and..."

"And today happened."

"In part," he agreed, taking her hand in his. "The rest... I really was disturbed by that vision. I mean, I think I would have eventually gotten around to starting to drill again no matter what. But I've never felt anything like that before. All of the other times I've seen things, it was hazy and I was never sure of when or where or if what I was seeing was real or not or just a possibility. And what I saw today, it was so _concrete_. And I _knew_ that it was a possibility for this reality and that scared me so badly, Lily. I was sitting there with my son and all I could think about was that he was going to die because I was too afraid to accept how I've changed."

"So today was part butt-kicking and part illumination?" she asked, shifting around on the couch so that she could rest her head on his shoulder. He twisted around as well and she found herself in his embrace instead, her head in the crook of his arm and her torso across his lap.

"I guess," Alex admitted. "But it was one ugly-ass breakthrough."

"They're not supposed to be warm and fuzzy," she informed him sardonically. The dark cloud that had been hovering over Alex since Dane had been put down to bed seemed to have lifted, she realized, and she was relieved to not have to be careful of what she said. Even sitting cozily like they were, Alex was still capable of flying into a sulk at astonishing speeds and Lily didn't want to be stuck in such a vulnerable physical position should that happen. Not that she feared him, because she didn't, but it was awkward and embarrassing to be cuddling one moment and being accused of being a cad the next.

"Says you," he retorted, a genuine smile playing on his lips for the first time in what seemed like forever. "I want my next one to be like advancing a board in a video game. The point-meter rolling up to the sound of bells and cha-chinging coins..."

"You want to be a Mario Brother?" Lily laughed. "What's the other one's name? Luigi?"

"Scott can be Luigi," Alex sniffed, trailing the back of his fingers against her cheek as he brushed hair out of her face. " _I_ want to get the girl."

What followed next was as much about distraction and relief as love, if not more. But it, too, reflected the day's events. For the first time, Lily thought as they lay together afterwards, Alex had been with her as he was, not as he had thought he should be in order to be the 'old' Alex. It had been different, not in a bad way at all, but different enough that Alex had that 'we have to talk' pose even as he lay on his side facing her. And that sobered her quickly.

"How much do you know about my Goblin Prince time?" he asked as she finally gave in to her trepidation and gestured with her hand for him to say whatever it was he was going to say. 

"Practically nothing," she replied, not expecting him to begin with a reference to anything that had happened _here_ in this reality. "It was pretty up there on the list of things you wouldn't talk about. Even more so than Genosha. I know it happened at the end of your time in Australia and was part of Inferno, but..."

"It was Maddie's last big piece of the puzzle," he began slowly, sitting up as well and fidgeting with the sheets, torn between his mutation's production of body heat and the modesty of the body that comes with having to bare one's soul. He looked suddenly uncertain and Lily sat up a little so that he didn't have the excuse of looking down at the bed instead of meeting her eyes. "Apart from the whole 'I want to sacrifice my infant son to create a permanent hellmouth in midtown' thing, which was really the overarching plan. Basically, she... seduced me, I guess."

Lily looked at him sharply, not sure whether to be amused or concerned. Alex was a passionate man - anything he did, he did all the way - and she knew that in his younger years, that passion had been well-matched by impetuousness and an impulsiveness that he had never quite grown out of. They had not spoken in great detail of their love lives before they had met, but Lily knew that there had to be a few surprising events of that sort in Alex's past. She would never have suspected Scott's rarely spoken of first wife to be one of them, however. Alex could be free-spirited, but he wasn't indecorous. Nobody had ever really wanted to talk about the events everyone called Inferno, but she had gotten bits and pieces over the years. But she hadn't heard _this_ part of the story and Scott, if he knew, didn't seem to hold it against his younger brother. 

"I wasn't completely innocent," he went on, looking sheepish. "I was supremely pissed off at Scott for abandoning her and their baby - little did I know what was going on there, but that's sort of by-the-by - and I felt bad that she was stuck with us in Australia, the only non-mutant among a group of hard-traveling heroes, her not knowing what had happened to her son and why she had been shot and all of the crazy stuff that had led to her being in Dallas with us in the first place. And, let's face it, she was a clone of Jean and Jean's not exactly hard on the eyes..."

Lily snorted, both in amusement and to cover her relief that whatever Alex and Maddie had done hadn't been too serious an indiscretion, and she was about to say something probably impolite when Alex's look of rueful embarrassment turned into something a lot more painful and her bemused smile faded instantly. 

"What happened next I'm not exactly sure about and I've never had the courage to ask Jean, who probably knows because she's got Maddie's memories," he finally continued after being lost in thought for long enough for Lily to touch his arm in gentle concern, "but the short of it is that with a little help from Maddie's telepathy, the fact that she was my sister-in-law stopped being such of an issue. It stopped being an issue at all and we became lovers. She was messing with all of our heads by that point, dulling all of our curiosity about what we had left behind and editing what we did hear and see. She was the one in charge of the communications room. Patronizing idiots that we were, we had been so _relieved_ to let her do that because felt so bad that she couldn't go adventure with us because she wasn't a mutant. 

"Anyway, when she finally revealed herself as the Goblin Queen, I was too much in her grasp to know which end was up. She took me as her consort, the Goblin Prince, and I sided with her against Scott and Jean and everyone else. Until it was almost too late."

Lily sat stunned, not sure what to say. She had known that whatever had happened to Alex during Inferno had been significantly more 'not good' than what had happened to many of the others. But now, suddenly, she understood why certain people had always been so hesitant to bring Madelyne Pryor's name up in Alex's presence. 

Alex gave her a 'yeah, I know' kind of bitter smile before going on. "It was pretty much a relief that I didn't have too much time to think about it afterwards - Inferno ended and it wasn't too long before we were through the Siege Perilous and I was Magistrate Summers, and after _that_ was over, I let myself get lost in the cleanup and X-Factor and everything else that eventually got me fried enough to quit the hero business."

This was another part of their routine, had been since that first night Alex had told her that he was Havok: he confessed his past and then braced himself for her to reject him because of it. It was a reaction that was both frustrating and disappointing to her - frustrating because Alex should know her better and disappointing because perhaps he did and that's why he got nervous. 

"And I know what happens in the story after that," she broke in, knowing that she sounded June Cleaver kind of forced-cheerful, a timbre that would sound especially false to Alex coming from her, but she felt that she had to say something lest Alex start to get worried. 

"Yeah," he agreed, leaning over to kiss her and reaching for her hand before sitting back again. "For which I am grateful in ways that all of those lifetimes have not taught me how to express."

She was about to say that the prior activities could be construed as very well-received expressions of that gratitude when all of what Alex had been saying about Madelyne clicked into place and Lily clamped her mouth shut before she could say anything flippant. This hadn't been one of the garden variety 'mind control betrayals' that the X-types tended to laugh about after it was over, the way Piotr still blushed furiously every time Kurt called him Proletariat Man. This had been a much deeper, much more intimate kind of control. Suddenly, their own personal sexual history suddenly became much more clearly defined. Alex did not give up control easily or well. But because she did, that had rarely even been an issue. It had never dawned on her that Alex's need to maintain personal control had been anything other than preference.

Alex had been watching her closely, she realized, because all he did was nod knowingly. "I knew I hadn't ever dealt with what Maddie did to me, but after so much water had gone under the bridge and after I fell in love with you and we were working out so well, I figured that maybe time had healed _this_ wound..."

"It didn't," she said quietly, not a question at all. And for a brief moment, she hated Scott and Jean and all of the other X-types with all of her not inconsiderable fury. They knew the details. And they had done nothing.

"The first reality I popped into, the one with Scotty," Alex said, nodding, "That universe's Madelyne was his mother, that Alex's _wife_."

Lily closed her eyes, wishing she could close her ears as well. Oh, no. 

"I was new to the whole reality-hopping thing - I hadn't even figured out what had happened yet and I had no idea that that would only be the first stop," Alex went on, squeezing her hand in acknowledgement of the difficulty of what he had to say. "So I was open about trying to get back to my reality. Obviously, everyone thought I was crazy and they secretly had me tested. That universe's Reed Richards told Maddie that I had brain damage from 'nearly' drowning and Maddie - who was already on her way to being that universe's Goblin Queen, even if she didn't know it yet - wanted to help me out, make me _right_ again." 

She didn't want to hear this, didn't want to hear about all this pain that was beyond her grasp to prevent and yet she felt like there was something she should have done, could have done. Because if Scott and Jean and Charles Xavier knew the history, she had known the man. And all of the anger that she had initially felt towards them now turned inward because there had been no more healing on her watch than on theirs. So she listened, a penance for her crime of omission. 

"It was a natural assumption that the brain damage was responsible for my 'amnesia,' responsible for why I was acting like I wasn't in love with her and was instead in love with someone else, why I thought that my son hadn't been born yet," he continued dispassionately. "Reed couldn't reverse the damage, so Maddie fixed me the only way a telepath would, by reintroducing the memories. But she wasn't really herself anymore, wasn't even the woman that _that_ Alex had married. She was the avatar of the Goblin Force and the Goblin Force loves displays of power. So instead of just showing me what she thought that I should have known, she made me fall in love with her again."

Lily felt the tears fall, but didn't stop them and was surprised to feel Alex wipe them away with his hand. Smiling miserably, she took his hand from her cheek and kissed his knuckles.  

"When Maddie finally embraced the Goblin Force, I didn't follow her like I had the first time. I don't know why, even now. Maybe because I didn't have that well of deep antipathy towards Scott to use against me, maybe it was my memories of you holding me back; I don't know and I've spent time wondering." He shook his head absently. "But while I didn't become the Goblin Prince again, it didn't hurt any less once my head cleared.  Because all I could think about was that _twice_ she had gotten to me, taken me body and soul without asking permission. And the first time I had been traitorous to Scott, but he's my brother and there was no way I could have known. But the second time I had been traitorous to _you_... This is your cue, by the way. Our agreement can be suspended for tonight."

She laughed involuntarily, not even knowing how she could do so. But she gave her best smile. "If you need me to tell you that I don't hold you responsible for that, then I don't know what the hell you're doing in this bed, Buster. You should know me better than that."

"I do," he admitted, pulling her close. "But I still need to hear the words all the same. I... I hated myself for a long time after that. And I don't think I hit a lower point, even at the end, than I did when I found out that it was all part of a cycle. History was _supposed_ to repeat itself. The Goblin Force didn't want Maddie or Jean or anyone else; whomever it used as its avatar was merely a way to get to me. It wanted _me_ because I was the Nexus of All Realities. That's how I found out what I was, by the way."

"Summers's luck being what it is and all," Lily muttered with grim humor and Alex nodded. 

"But I couldn't be its host," he went on. "Some cosmic check-and-balance made that impossible. I could, however, be its tool. And so in every reality, since it couldn't take me directly, I was going to be _taken_ by someone it could control and used to rule the multiverse. I... didn't deal with that news too well."

"Worse than when you found out that you were a mutant?" Lily asked. It was weak humor, but Alex smiled nonetheless. 

"Much worse," he confirmed darkly, all trace of humor vanishing. "I died in that first reality so that I could take the Goblin Force with me. I didn't know that I'd be simply transported to another reality and I really didn't care. There was no way I could have gone on, reality to reality, just to get raped like that again and again for all eternity."

Still in Alex's loose embrace, she kissed his neck. Part of her wanted to shush him so that he wouldn't have to keep thinking of those dark days, but she knew better. He needed to get this out and she honestly wasn't sure if he'd have the strength to do it again should she allow him to falter here.

"In the end, I was lucky," he continued. "I learned enough about the Goblin Force so that I knew that Maddie wasn't really to blame, at least in the sense that while she had knowingly accepted the Goblin Force powers, she wasn't ultimately responsible for its plans to conquer the multiverse. So when I destroyed the Goblin Force, I made sure not to hurt her. So I didn't leave Scotty alone."

There was silence then, a heavy silence that Lily was sure she could reach out and touch as it hung around them. This was a confession that had been a decade in the making, more than a many decades if she counted all of Alex's time in other realities. And in that time, the story of how Alex had been manipulated into the Goblin Prince, a story that had been rather simple in its ugliness, had gotten chapters added to it, each worse than the last. Its horror was not only in the deeds it told of, but (Alex being Alex) also in its secrecy because if it was hidden, then he could worry that this would be the tale that would finally drive her away. But she was still there and Lily wasn't sure whether to be in awe of how strong he was or hit him for bearing that weight unnecessarily.

"When you sit there and think about how much darkness you've seen and how far you've strayed from the sunny and carefree man you seem to think that you once were and never really _actually_ were," she finally said, "Do you think about how much light there still is in you? About your capacity not only to survive, but to forgive and do good and be happy?"

She was rewarded by one of his complicated looks, one of those special moments where a maelstrom of emotions passed over his face and could be picked out like constellations in the sky. There was self-loathing, there was humor, and over there was confusion, which was right next to bemusement... 

"You have come through unimaginable experiences with your compassion and your sense of humor intact," she told him. "In your whole integration-of-personalities project, don't forget that you carry more than scars."

She was rewarded with a smile illuminated by the moon that had risen far enough to shine through the curtained windows. 

Past Alex, she could see the clock on his nightstand and she must have winced when she saw the time because he turned and then chuckled and then reached behind her for her nightshirt and handed it to her with a grin. 


	27. March 2012

"Can I answer it?"

Alex looked down at his son, poised eagerly over the ringing telephone. Dane wasn't allowed to answer the phone without permission, although he'd quickly learned that his mother was more than willing to grant it. 

"Please?"

First checking the caller ID, Alex nodded and Dane pounced. 

"Hello?... Hi, Grandma!"

Alex went back to the kitchen to finish preparing lunch; Dane could tell Star that Lily wasn't home as well as he could.

It was a blustery day outside and he could hear the rattle of the kitchen window as the wind banged against it even over the sizzle of the frying pan as he made grilled cheese. Finishing the sandwich, he scooped it out of the pan and onto the cutting board so that he could slice it in half. He'd put salami in the middle and had to make sure to cut all the way through the first time lest the salami be dragged out of the warm cheese. Dane would fuss if the meat looked wedged-in. Strange child. Lily's child. 

He put the sandwich on the plate with the carrot and celery sticks and took the plate over to Dane's spot at the table next to the glass of milk he'd already poured. Leaning over, he could see his son chatting cheerfully with Star. Alex could hear the conversation vaguely; Dane was relating his most recent school and hockey exploits. 

Pulling open the fridge, Alex dug out the leftovers from last night. Dane hadn't been wild about the chicken - he was rarely wild about chicken with the notable exception of Chinese food; fish had a better reception - which was why Alex had capitulated on the grilled cheese request. 

"Daaaaddddyyyy!"

Putting the plastic container on the counter, Alex wiped his hands on his jeans and headed into the living room where Dane was holding the phone out to him. 

"Grandma wants to talk to you," Dane reported. 

Alex took the phone with one hand and gestured with the other towards the kitchen. "Your lunch is ready. Don't wait for me."

Dane ran off and Alex could hear the scrape of wooden chair legs on linoleum as he put the phone to his ear. 

"Hello."

"Alex!" Star's phone voice was always remarkably chipper, Alex noted, as if she could overcome the distance by sheer force of personality. "How are you doing?"

"Well," he answered, sitting down on the loveseat. "Getting back into the swing of things still. And yourself?"

"Same old story. The community garden is flowering and I'm about to start a new one near the retirement home. It'll be a bit more maintenance than the others - the old folks can't do as much of the heavy labor - but I'm looking forward to it."

Alex smiled. Star was young in spirit - she was over sixty, but still considered herself middle-aged and thought retirement homes were for 'old folks.' She looked a good five years younger than she was, at least, and it should have been a comfort to Lily, who had just found her first gray hair. But every time Alex tried to remind her of it, Lily had grumped about how her mother's youthfulness had probably come as a result of her lifestyle and she had concluded that she was prepared to buy hair dye if it meant not having to give up chocolate and coffee. Of course, Rear Admiral Beck also looked good for his age but Lily was quick to attribute that to the preservatives they stuck into Navy food. 

"That's great," Alex replied. "So what can I do for you?"

It seemed silly to pretend that Star was just calling to chat. 

"I wanted to bounce an idea off of you," Star began, her tone of voice suggesting that she thought it was a very good idea. "Dan told me about how your friends got the two of you a vacation and we wanted to know if you had made any plans for it yet."

The trip had been a gift from a group of friends - Bobby and Cecilia, Rogue and Joseph, Piotr and Callisto (and children), Kurt and Amanda, and Orly had signed the card - as a combination Christmas and 'welcome home' present. To Alex, however, it was also a none-too-subtle reminder that he and Lily needed some time alone together. 

He and Lily did need a vacation in a way that had stopped being funny a while ago. Between working long hours at the lab and having to be the strong, sane adult at home, Lily was constantly exhausted. He wasn't much better - Frohmeyer had pronounced him caught up enough to serve as primary assistant researcher on his new geomorphology monograph (it was what he had done at the end of his graduate studies) and right now that meant hours spent fact checking in between keeping up with Dane and continuing his therapy and going down to the XSE for training sessions and all the rest of the activities that could put his life back in order.

Lily would admit that they needed a couple of days off, but she had balked at almost every effort Alex had made to procure such. Not that he'd made much of one. They had spent a long weekend at a rented house upstate, taking Dane on trails where he had seen his first deer and to a farm where he had petted his first rabbit. But that had been six weeks ago and it was terribly obvious that it hadn't been enough. Especially when Lily confessed to not remembering when the prior vacation had been - Alex was pretty sure it had been with him.  
   
"Not specifics, no," he admitted. "We'd have to come up with a time that was good for Lily's work and mine, not to mention what to do with Dane..."

"That's where my idea comes in," Star interrupted. "Well, our idea really. Dan and I wanted to offer ourselves up as babysitters."

Alex hoped he hadn't sighed into the phone. Dane's presence - or the lack thereof - was a big part of why he and Lily hadn't made any definite plans. At least it was a big part of why he hadn't pushed Lily. 

Alex had come to agree with Lily - he wasn't sure, either, where Dane's personality came from. As much as Alex loved his wife, he knew that Dane having spent so much time exclusively in his mother's company, he should have been a lot less social than he was. Dane was good humored and perceptive and inquisitive - occasionally frustratingly so, especially when it came to his penchant for taking things apart to see how they worked. Alex wouldn't go so far as to call Dane outgoing - he still had a tendency to be an observer in new social settings rather than an immediate participant - but he was definitely one of the more popular kids in his pre-kindergarten class. 

To Alex's eternal thanks, Dane had taken to him like a long-lost parent and not like a stranger impinging on Lily's time. Dane wasn't jealous (at least not very much and really not since the beginning) and while he could be very suspicious, he wasn't of Alex. They were still learning about each other, but Dane didn't have the sort of personality to try to play one parent off the other in any but the most minor ways. There were still moments when the past mattered, when Alex could feel his own absence acutely in his son's life, such as when Dane called out for his mother when he woke up from a nightmare or hurt himself doing something. But Dane wouldn't object if Alex were the one who came to comfort him and Alex appreciated that immensely.

But all of that was with the three of them living together; Alex wasn't sure how Dane would take his parents running off for a week without him. Even if he were to be distracted by his grandparents in the interim.

"We honestly hadn't come to a decision about what to do with him," Alex said finally. "Whether we should try to get another ticket and bring him along or... I mean, you two would be our first choices for babysitters, but..."

"Alex, totally apart from my overwhelming desire to spoil my grandson rotten for a few days," Star said firmly. "I think the two of you need to spend some time together and remember that there was a 'two of you' before Dane. I speak from experience here. It took Dan and I entirely too long to remember that we had more in common than a daughter. By which point we were living on opposite coasts and said daughter was in college."

Alex smiled ruefully, aware that Star felt brave enough to say those things to him even if they both knew that she'd die before saying the same to Lily, who in turn would rather suffer than admit that her mother could offer sane relationship advice. At the same time, he knew that Star was right. 

"I know," he agreed quietly, more to say something lest Star get nervous. "But... I don't know. Keeping up with Dane, catching up with him really... Lily understands."

"A little more advice from experience, if I may," Star said a little hesitantly. "With all the missing years in my time with Dan and Lily, I've always tried to focus on what happens when I'm around. I can't pretend that they haven't done a lot of their growing away from me; I never could. Sometimes that change was so big it felt like I'd turn my back for a moment and a new person would be standing there and I would have to introduce myself to them all over again. I was sure that each time, I was ending up with a smaller and smaller piece of what I'd had before..."

Alex made a noise of acknowledgement. This would have been a conversation better done in person than over the phone, although perhaps Star's bravery came precisely because there was no eye contact possible.

"I got so depressed when I thought about it in those terms - like I was losing something," she went on, a little rushed, as if she thought that he'd cut her off. "I had to stop looking at the people I loved like I owned them. I wasn't losing anything because it had never been mine to lose. And I had to look at it like it was a gift, which it was. Which it is. Dan and Lily choose to share their lives with me and I have to be thankful of that, no matter what their motivations. Love, duty, simple habit... They don't have to. Nobody _has_ to. And so I stopped looking at what I was losing and started to appreciate what I gained. What I could learn from them and what they could learn from me. Because growth is constant and they haven't done _all_ of it when I wasn't around, you know?"

Alex had to admit that he was a little surprised at how much sense Star was making -- and also a little guilty for that surprise. Not only because Star was making a lot of sense with respect to how he dealt with his own life, but also because he was suddenly getting a whole lot of insight into her relationship with Lily. He had always felt bad for Star, felt bad that Lily was so often resentful and impatient and unwilling to compromise with her. But he was realizing that Star didn't need his pity, which was really what it was. She probably understood her daughter a lot better that Lily would think and had found her own peace, even if that understanding didn't often bring literal peace when they were together. 

"Everyone looks at Lily and sees Dan's daughter," Star went on when he didn't say anything. "His personality, his features, his interests. And that used to burn me up and the more I tried to mold her in my own image, the less she resembled me. But I learned to stop being jealous and to shed my pridefulness and it wasn't until I did that that I could see _my_ daughter there, too. And to see that others could see that as well."

"I certainly can," Alex said with a touch of amusement. Lily's stubbornness came from Star, he was sure. It was perhaps more natural to assume that Lily's force of personality came from her father and his military background, but the truth of it was that Rear Admiral Beck was a lot more flexible than either Star or Lily, a lot more accommodating and accepting. 

"So I'm making a little bit of sense?" Star asked curiously. 

"A lot of sense," Alex agreed. "A lot if important sense. Thank you."

"I don't want to make it sound like I'm ordering you around or telling you how it has to be or anything like that. It's just... I want someone to learn from my experience."

Left unsaid was the fact that Lily wasn't going to be the one to do it, at least not willingly. 

Alex was racking his brain for something suitable to say in reply when Dane came running out of the kitchen, carrot sticks coming out of his mouth like fangs. 

"Dane, don't run around like that," Alex told him, even as he smiled at his son, who was mugging outrageously at him. Dane had probably been saving them, waiting for his father to come into the kitchen so that he could show off. 

Dane took the carrot sticks out of his mouth. "Tell Grandma I'm a vampire."

"Dane is a vampire," Alex dutifully reported, a little relieved at the forced change in topic. "Pictures at eleven."

"Picture!" Dane's eyes lit up. "Take a picture of me to send to Grandma."

"Finish your lunch and then we'll talk," Alex told him. He could hear Star chuckling as Dane ran back into the kitchen. 

After thanking Star again, Alex said his goodbyes. Back in the kitchen, Dane was finishing the last of his sandwich and playing percussion with his celery as Alex went back to preparing his own lunch. He'd talk to Lily about their vacation when she came home.

* * *

"So?" Orly asked as she sat down, not even bothering to say hello. 

Lily smiled. "It was good."

A week on St. Croix with lots of sun, sand, and sex and where the only reading material had been pulp novels that bore neither technical jargon nor a vocabulary fit for primary school. Alex had done all of the planning - including going behind her back to get Tom to clear out her calendar so that taking time off wouldn't affect the rest of the office. 

"As if the glowing tan at the end of a dreary New York winter wasn't proof of that," Orly muttered good-naturedly and then gestured with her hand in silent exhortation to elaborate as the waiter approached bearing menus. Lily held her tongue until he could finish announcing the specials for the meal.

Sunday brunch at the Upper East Side bistro they had chosen was bustling - as far as the Upper East Side would allow itself to bustle. This was the old money part of upper Manhattan, the place where the Astors and Carnegies had had their townhouses, where women past a certain age didn't leave the house without a hat and before that age dressed exactly out of the pages of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. It was a lifestyle that neither she or Orly had aspired to, Lily knew, but now that they were in their thirties, it had a certain appeal that it hadn't had ten years before. 

"It was..." Lily trailed off, trying to come up with the best way to explain how _good_ a week alone with Alex had been. "Necessary, that's the first thing. Not only for me, but for us."

"Which was the point," Orly retorted, thanking the waiter who brought the insulated carafe of coffee and the frosted pitcher of orange juice. 

"We did a lot of talking," Lily went on, sipping at the juice. Fresh-squeezed. Her mother had always refused to purchase juice at the grocery, preferring to make it herself with the juicer that Lily was pretty sure had been part of her parents' bridal registry. It had seemed just another one of her mother's eccentricities at the time, but Lily did miss it now that she had no time - and no space in her kitchen - to do it herself. "About all of the things that we were too scared to talk about here and could always find excuses not to push ourselves to do it anyway."

"No hiding behind Dane or work or school, huh?" Orly asked rhetorically, pouring cream into her coffee. Lily made a face and Orly made one right back. "Did you talk about past, present, or future? Or all of the above?"

"All of the above," Lily replied with a smile. "Mostly the present and the future, though. The past... Alex wants to straighten that out by himself before he tries to explain it to me, I guess. He knows I'm worried about him and it, but he asked me to trust him in this and I will. I have to."

Orly just nodded. There was nothing else to say to that. Out of respect for Alex, Lily hadn't ever talked about the details of his recovery, not that Orly would ever pry. Not that Lily herself understood. Alex had been improving ever since that terrifying day at the XSE headquarters and Lily knew that it had as much to do with his getting back into academia as it did with her own seeming acceptance that he wasn't going to be able to stay 'retired.' It wasn't paranoia or fear that made Alex want to maintain his level of training, but a new dedication born of his experiences that he had been afraid to admit it either to himself or to anyone else. In truth, Lily had been uneasy about it, but she had had much of her disquiet eased by Logan, of all people. He had basically said that he didn't think of Alex's continuing to work on his combat skills as a change in personality, more an acceleration of the old one - Logan hadn't thought that the 'old' Alex would have been able to stay away from the XSE forever, either. It just would have taken longer to draw him back, probably a tragedy that he would have felt sure that he could have prevented. It had taken Lily a good couple of days before she could admit that Logan had been right.

Lily blinked and Orly frowned. Apparently she had been asked a question. "Sorry?"

"I asked if you were going to be okay waiting," Orly repeated, her exasperation only for show. Orly always seemed to know her so well that they used to joke that Orly could carry on their entire conversation by herself and that Lily's actual participation was just a courtesy. "Patience has never been your virtue."

Lily shrugged. "What choice do I have?" 

"That's not the point," Orly replied, this time frowning genuinely. "Although maybe it is. You've become very much a creature of willpower over the past few years."

The waiter returned with plates laden with goodies rarely indulged in and both Lily and Orly sniffed appreciatively at bacon and ham and eggs with the yolks still in them. 

"That's something else we talked about," Lily said as she delicately moved a couple of her wild berry pancakes over to Orly's plate as Orly returned the favor with the banana nut waffles. "Me losing some of my... bulldozerness."

Orly coughed and laughed. "Sure. Like that's going to happen."

"I hope it does, Or," Lily sighed, not bothering to hide her disappointment that her best friend thought it a laughable notion. "I don't want to be the Little Engine That Could anymore."

"You didn't ever want to be," Orly reminded her, pausing to savor her bacon. "But that's just your coping mechanism. I've known you for eighteen years, Lily. That's how you deal. Someone tells you 'no' and your first reaction is 'damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.' It's the rationale behind pretty much every decision you've ever made in your life. With the notable exception of anything Alex, which is why I was willing to share my best friend with him."

Lily swallowed and then smiled. Orly had never been shy about giving her opinion of her boyfriends and Lily still remembered that the first time she told their undergraduate friend Ahn about Alex, she had added "and Orly doesn't hate him."

"So what did Alex have to say about a possible version of you that runs on decaf?" Orly asked, waving the waiter away who tried to refill her coffee cup. 

"He's having credulity issues," Lily admitted wryly. "But we decided that we can both be works in progress."

"Mmm," Orly mused. "Well, he's cute in his blind optimism and if you're going along with it..."

They finished brunch talking about other things. Orly was just starting to date a co-worker after months of trying to talk herself out of it by chanting 'no dipping your quill in the company ink' and things were progressing slowly but well. Ahn was pregnant again and Orly muttered about having to keep Baby Gap on retainer what with her youngest sister married to the devout Catholic and following the 'be fruitful and multiply' commandment "a little too enthusiastically."

Eventually, they paid the check and left to stroll down Madison Avenue and window-shop. Their aspirations to the gentry didn't go quite so far as to spend $400 on a wool shawl they both liked and they eventually walked a block west and headed back uptown on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park. 

A nanny walked by them, calling in a Jamaican accent after two little girls running ahead of her, both of whom were groomed immaculately with their dresses hidden by matching Burberry coats and their hair kept in place by matching tams, the nanny half-begging and half-ordering that they not scuff their shoes. 

"We talked about kids," Lily said quietly after the nanny and her charges were reunited. 

"As in Dane or as in additions to Dane?" Orly asked curiously. 

"As in additions," Lily answered, surprised at the embarrassed tone in her voice. Judging from the look on Orly's face, she was surprised as well, although probably not for the same reason. 

"It was part of a very weird conversation," she went on, smiling wryly. "We had never really had the Baby Conversation before Alex disappeared. Well, we had never had it _successfully_. If he wasn't being theoretical enough or if he sounded like he had been thinking about it in great detail, I'd freak out and Alex... he wasn't sure, either. Except he wasn't sure 'when' and I wasn't sure 'if' and then..."

"And then everything became a moot point and you've got a son who is turning five," Orly finished, heading into the park. It was the way home for Lily, but Orly needed to be on the East Side to get home via Grand Central, but she followed along after Orly silently indicated that she'd just double back later on her own. "Is this not discussing locks on barn doors after the cows are gone?"

"Yes and no," Lily replied as she deftly avoided a careening rollerblader. "I mean, yeah, I've pretty much solved the 'if' question and all that..." she snorted self-mockingly. 

"But?"

"But now we're trying to make sure that any decision we make is for the right reasons and we have no baseline to test it against," she went on as they climbed the incline and waited for the cyclists and runners to pass so that they could cross the drive. "It's not like we can be sure that having another kid isn't some vague way of making it up to Alex that he missed out on Dane's early years or anything like that because we had always planned on having two. Because we _didn't_ plan. We planned nothing. And we have to think about how will Dane react because he's _going_ to react. Neither of us want him to think that he was the accident or the trial run or the last beta version before we did it the way we wanted to. I don't want it to come down to it being either Alex or Dane feeling like they're getting the short end of the stick. And I'm not sure how to proceed so as best to avoid that."

"Well," Orly began after a thoughtful pause. "Skimming past your paranoia about Dane feeling slighted because, let's face it, you're an only child and know not of what you speak. I wouldn't trade my spot as first-born for anything. My little sisters were like having pets. At least until they got annoying and started to talk..."

Lily smiled. Orly was the eldest of four girls. 

"But let's start with the easy question," Orly went on. "What do _you_ want. Not thinking like Dane's mom or Alex's wife but as _you_ , the person who used to swear up and down that there was no way in hell that you were going to contribute to the global overpopulation of bloody morons. I mean, we all knew that you were basing your opinions on parenthood on your own maternal issues, but... what do you want to do? Especially as _you_ are going to be the one puking your guts out for a few months until you start bitching about how fat you're getting.. And remind me that I am going to have to talk to Alex about this because I'll be damned if I'm going to sit through another nine months of you checking your figure every six hours and whining about your hips."

Lily made a face at both Orly's sarcasm as well as her honest question. She had thought about it a little bit. A very little bit. Because every time she tried to think along those lines, she felt selfish because how could she exclude either Alex or Dane from her thoughts? 

"I think I do want another one," she finally said. "Because I sorta know what I'm doing now and half of the stress was self-inflicted and I've got more people to yell at me this time. Stop laughing, Orly! And hell, if I could handle being a single working mother with an alpha-level electrokinetic baby and Dane still turned out to be such an awesome little person... I want to do this _with_ Alex, not _for_ him. Not like a debt that has to be paid back, but so that I can share that 'look what we did' pride with every milestone instead of just feeling heartache that Alex isn't around to see it. And Dane is going to be a terrific big brother." 

"Another baby is going to require lifestyle changes," Orly went on even as she nodded, pausing slightly before a fork in the path before heading towards the left. Lily smiled inwardly. It was totally Orly to assume that she and Alex had looked past the practical parts of their decision. "Unless it's a boy, you're going to be pressed for space in your apartment - or else you're going to have to give up your office and turn it into a bedroom and you guys had to move the last time because that wasn't feasible. And then there's work - Alex may be cool with the househusband thing, but you can't keep pulling eighty-hour weeks. Do you think you can stay at the labs at forty or fifty hours?"

"I know," Lily sighed. "And baby or not I'm kind of thinking that the lab isn't where I want to be for the next thirty years. I love what I'm doing, but I don't love everything else that goes with it. Every month it seems like I'm more a bureaucrat and less of a scientist and that's not what I ever wanted to do with my life, cutting edge field or not."

"Chronography isn't exactly rife with career alternatives," Orly pointed out as they skirted a toddler laughing at being chased by a leashed poodle wearing a sweater and booties. "And you are not cut out to join the XSE."

"Ugh," Lily grunted, shuddering in revulsion. "No, it's bad enough Alex is so involved, even if it's what he needs. Actually, I sort of miss teaching - not the half-wits at City, but when I give talks at colleges now and I have intelligent questions asked and... I miss the thrill of imparting knowledge. It happened far too rarely at City, but I'm in a position to pick a job where I have a better chance at the light bulb going on and it not being fifteen watts. Ye Olde Alma Mater seems to be vaguely interested and not in that 'we just want you to apply so that we can say that we have a woman candidate' kind of way."

"Joe Perotelli has been waiting for you to be ripe enough to teach there for fifteen years," Orly cackled loudly enough to scare a squirrel watching them from a park bench. "It was like an academic version of 'Lolita' with him just watching you and waiting for the moment when he could approach you. He was Humbert Humbert!"

"Orly!" 

"What?" she asked defiantly. "How often do grad students at one university help out professors from _undergrad_ at another university? The man has been cultivating you like a farmer with a prize turnip."

Lily was laughing too hard to reply and had to take deep breaths before she could speak. "You are my best friend and I love you but you can be so damned weird sometimes, you know that?"

"I call 'em as I see 'em," Orly sniffed, still defiant.   

"I am not a turnip."


	28. May-June 2012

"Lily?"

She held a finger up to indicate that she'd switch her attention over in a moment. Finishing writing down the sequence of numbers, Lily looked behind her. 

"It's five of one," Alice Epstein said. She was kneeling on her desk, Lily assumed, her head appearing through the nest of spider plants that rested on the border between their cubicles. Alice was notorious for keeping a neat workspace and actually had room on her desk upon which to climb. Lily, on the other hand, didn't even remember what color the formica was underneath her clutter.

She nodded, but Alice had already removed herself from her perch. She took the tablet off of its docking station and headed off towards one of the small conference rooms. Nathan, Scott, and Sam Guthrie were there already, Nathan having teleported them in from the XSE headquarters downtown. Bishop had been forced to stay behind because of some emerging situation that Lily really hadn't cared to inquire about. 

"Afternoon guys," she said as she entered, deftly avoiding stepping on Louisa as the office manager was crouching down by the electrical outlet nearest to the door. "Sorry, Louisa. Didn't see you... How are you feeling, Scott?"

She was glad nobody else was in the room - she wanted time to establish the pecking order. Within the lab, Lily tried to keep her authority casual, but she hated it when the XSE came in to her world and acted like they owned the place. They might end up doing so in the future - there had been murmurs of incorporating a chronography division within the XSE hierarchy - but right now, this was Lily's house and she had to make sure they knew that. 

"Uncomfortable," Scott muttered, squirming in his seat until he was leaning back as far as the chair would go. "I stopped taking the painkillers because they were making me stupid. I have an appointment with Dana this evening."

Lily nodded as she took her seat. She knew Dana had been traveling a lot lately, but hadn't realized how often she must be away if Scott hadn't gotten help from her by now. He had wrenched his back in a training exercise a couple of weeks ago. In general, now that the X-folks were no longer living in such close proximity to each other, it was harder to know who was doing what where. Scott, Jean, and the twins were the only ones now living on the Xavier estate - now the XSE Academy - and Lily was often slow to ask for updates on the far-flung extended family. 

Alice and Tom entered the room next, nodding greetings to everyone - Alice knew Nathan better than almost everyone else in the lab group and Tom had had enough dealings with the XSE hierarchy to be more than politely interested in catching up. Miri Ahearn came running in, face flushed, as Sam was in the middle of telling Lily about Alison's latest attempt to prove that she was a telekinetic like her brother. Miri had taken an early lunch to go to a doctor's appointment and had warned Lily that she might be a few minutes late. 

Peter Vasiljevs, the head of the programming subgroup, came in carrying a laptop with a pile of flash drives balanced on top of a mini-projector. He immediately went over to the seat closest to the data jacks, forcing Nathan to shift over, and started plugging his toys in. "Stan and Vic think they'll have the filters you asked for by three," he told Alice. "There was a problem with one of them. One of your parameters made the first test-drive explode."

"That's what I was hoping for, actually," Alice replied. "Well, not hoping for, but what I thought would happen." 

She turned to Lily. "Those were the filters we worked out," she explained and Lily made a face. She and Alice had been plotting worst-case scenarios and anything that had a sequence that converged at infinity was considered to represent an impossible event. Lily had been skeptical of some of the situations Alice had proposed, thinking them too far-fetched even considering past oddities and thus a waste of time, but Alice, the Historical Data Analysis head, had insisted and Lily had translated her requests into fluid dynamics terms and sent them off to the mainframes.

Ubong Wadkins and Rob Anazole, math and stats heads respectively, entered and Ubi closed the door behind them. Lily sat up straight in her chair as they took their seats and waited for Louisa to nod that she was ready to start taking notes. 

"Okay, let's get this show on the road," Lily began. "If you'll all open your folders you'll find the timeline Radek Droppa from Midnight produced for us. This is the latest draft of the non-mathematical version and the only changes in this one from the one you were all emailed are that the incidents in Jordan and Switzerland were removed and there is a new entry for the synagogue destruction in Alsace. As was said in the last email, any questions on real-life events go to Radek or Roger Marlowe and Louisa will send out clean copies today along with the rest of what we produce here."

Years of teaching had given her good intuition as to when to pause in the middle of monologues. She did now, waiting for everyone to open the manila folders, find the new entries, and then mark them in whatever fashion they chose. 

The timeline had been a very hard document to produce and was the result of hours upon hours of intense cooperation between HisDAs, the field service, and the units that normally dealt exclusively in the theoretical aspects of chronography. Lily had nearly lost her voice in one particularly acrimonious meeting by shouting down Bob Sagerstein and the chorus of HisDAs specialists down at Midnight when they had tried to overrule Alice - their counterpart here in New York - on a set of threat assessments. 

It was too simplistic to say that the timeline was a map of nexus points; instead, what they were hoping to accomplish was the detailing of one particular time stream. Hopefully, it would be the correct one and they would be able to use their resources to either lessen or completely avoid the still-unknown future event that had Nathan and the clairvoyants so distressed.

"Jordan and Switzerland have stopped being our problem and can be considered yours," she went on after everyone's attention was back on her, smiling innocently at Scott's frown. He handled much of the administrative duties within the XSE and the investigation of the incidents would probably be his bureaucratic headache. "We were skeptical about their relevance to our problem from the start, as you'll recall from our last get-together, but now I can give you a more precise reason why: the Alsatian synagogue destruction wasn't what we all thought it was."

The three XSE officers shifted forward in their seats, even Nathan. Lily had included a sort of warning in her last email to Nathan on the matter, but it had been early in the process and the final sample had finished running only last night. Right now, she nodded to Alice, who had been the one conferring with Roger and Radek. 

"We had been operating on the premise that the synagogue destruction was part of the rash of anti-Semitic attacks that have been going on in Western Europe," Alice began sourly. She was Orthodox and the wave of hate crimes had pained her deeply. "According to the reports, it fit the pattern of those defilements in the geographic area - the only smashed windows were those depicting Jewish rites, the Torah scrolls had been removed from the ark and unrolled before they were burned, the Nazi graffiti and so forth and so on. Our field operatives verified this in their first report and the inventory we procured from the French police seemed to support that conclusion. But we were having a ton of problems trying to work that data into our schemes and it wasn't until our own agents drew up _their_ inventory that we figured out why: we now believe that the destruction was staged to look like an anti-Semitic attack but was in fact an elaborate artifact retrieval."

"What changed your minds?" Sam asked, gesturing unconsciously at the spot on the timeline with the tip of his pen. Lily idly wondered at what point she had stopped seeing his still-so-youthful face and started seeing how time passed in his eyes, in his expression, and in his voice. He could still do the folksy thing, but it was now country gentleman instead of green-eared farm boy. But there was nothing folksy about his demeanor now - it was all business and even though Lily knew his features hadn't changed in the decade since he'd flown off the roof of Alex's apartment building in Princeton, she couldn't even see that person now.

"Back in the old days we had a list," Alice replied. The ten-year veteran of Nathan's pre-Akkaba network nodded slightly in acknowledgement to Nathan before going on and Lily was sure that nobody in the room missed the reference. "A list of artifacts, events, people, and other bits that had to do with En Sabah Nur. 'Pandora's Box' we called it. It was a relatively small grouping - history's been anything but short of predictions of doom and gloom and we wanted to avoid false positives. But anything in the Box had been cross-referenced and triple-checked with whatever records we had from both future and past so that if any one of them was active in any way, we got suspicious. If two or more were in play, we called in the reserves and hunkered down for a crisis. Akkaba had about ten elements in motion. We destroyed eight of them during the battle and five inactive ones were removed in the course of events. That's thirteen down and the original Box had twenty-eight. We've added nine since then, so we're at twenty-four now."

"So whatever's still in this 'Box' still has an effect on the timeline with or without Apocalypse's help," Sam asked. "Or is this supposed to be some kind of early warning system in case Apocalypse comes back from the dead somehow?"

Lily snuck a glance at Nathan, who looked unaffected, at least outwardly.

"More the former than the latter," Alice replied with a half-shrug. "We're not actively checking to make sure Nur's still dead, but this would definitely say if he were to somehow reappear."

In a world where neither the good guys nor the bad guys stayed dead, this was not an unusual precaution and nobody reacted.

"There was something from this Box in Alsace?" Scott prompted, eyes on Nathan and a sour expression on his face. Lily didn't need to be a telepath to see that father and son were going to be having a long conversation about what sort of timestream-affecting details qualified as 'trivial' and whether Nathan should be the only one deciding that. "And who else knows about either the Box or what it means?"

"More than one something and nobody not already on our side," Alice said. "Box elements... it's not a scavenger hunt where X number of elements gets you a prize. Some of the elements are very straightforward in what they are and what they can do and don't require any special knowledge to realize that they are important to the timestream. The American government's 'nuclear football' is an element, for example. But the rest -- most of them -- are much more abstract and are only component parts, atoms to a molecule, and wouldn't register as relevant to anyone not doing this kind of work. Especially as the ones we've added since Akkaba are completely unrelated to En Sabah Nur in any way; they're mundane in every sense of the word."

"But not so mundane that you're not worried about them," Sam said, not making it a question.

"No," Alice agreed. "And what went missing from Alsace is very worrying."

"'Apocalypse is back' kind of worrying?"

"Too soon to say," Alice answered with a frown. "It's not our first solution to the puzzle, but we can't say it's not a possible one."

The reaction to the very real possibility that the still-vague crisis in waiting involved Apocalypse was muted but severe. It felt different to hear it out loud, Lily mused, spoken in plain language instead of being the suggested extrapolation of a series of curves and the sum of equations that had the same answer but didn't carry the emotional weight. It was like those horror stories where the monster didn't appear unless you said his name out loud three times and they had just repeated it for the first time.

"Are these discrepancies with what was reported missing from Alsace and what _actually_ went missing the result of intentional obfuscation, carelessness, or genuine ignorance?" Scott asked in a tone that gave little doubt that he thought it was one of the first two. 

"We don't know for sure," Lily cut in, making eye contact with Alice as she spoke. Alice could sometimes speak in unintentional absolutes and while normally it wasn't a problem and the lab personnel would mentally translate it without issue, Lily didn't want Nathan jumping any starter's pistols. "We're tempted to go with obfuscation - there's an Interpol agent whose involvement should be a red flag, but we're not sure what he knows."

"I want details," Nathan rumbled, not looking up from where he was writing something down in the margins. There was no point in trying to see what it was - his handwriting wasn't very clear in English and Lily had no idea how much better or worse it was in Askani, the language he invariably took his personal notes in. "Alice, how bad is it?"

It was a question that would have been ridiculous in its simplicity had it been meant to be taken literally. 

"Ten years ago, we would have been preparing for Convergence," she said without hesitation. 

Lily understood the term - Convergence was how the time-watchers in Nathan's old network had referred to an instance that would affect every single possible time stream; Akkaba had been a Convergence. But she was sure that nobody else in the room not Nathan realized what Alice had said. 

"It has the possibility of turning into an Akkaba-level event," she translated. "Not excluding a return of the star himself."

The tone of the room went from cautious wariness to outright concern. 

"Pete, put up the graphs of the last two revisions of our timeline, please?" Lily waited until the screen along the wall showed the projections. "Before we get sucked into worrying about whether or not we're going to be reliving Akkaba, I want to revisit some of the methods behind the madness. It's important to emphasize the mechanics of what we've done because anything to do with En Sabah Nur is not brought up lightly and it's crucial that we eliminate every doubt that this is the proper path."

She was speaking to the room in general, her own people as well as the XSE representatives, but she was looking straight at Nathan. She still didn't know how much of this Nathan had already sussed out, whether he could feel the creep of Apocalypse in particular or whether it was just some vague foreboding shadow, and she didn't know who he had told what. Nathan being Nathan, this was probably still a very private nightmare for him.

"I want to start by going back to Jordan and Switzerland and their effect on the timeline we had been working on," Lily went on, breaking eye contact with Nathan and looking around the table and waiting for everyone to flip back to the proper page. It was important that she dial back the tension level in the room - it did nobody any good to have stress levels rising so quickly. If Nur was involved, things would heat up soon enough and Lily wanted as much productive time as possible before anger and memories started to dictate actions and reactions. 

"Speaking in non-tech terms, the changes in the timeline were both a blessing and a pain in the ass. There had been a lot of fighting within HisDAs about the assignment of values to Jordan," she went on, pausing to acknowledge Alice's reflexive sneer of resentment at her colleagues, "and Switzerland was dropping our ability to get an acceptable Actuality Assessment where we'd feel comfortable pushing forward. Losing them both gets us up to a much larger sample and, as you can see on the bottom graph on the screen, lets our best-fit curve be a much better fit. We can shunt them back in at a later time if we have to, but things look a lot cleaner without them."

Again, she paused to let the information sink in. Of the three XSE officers, Nathan had the best understanding of what had been involved in producing the timeline. Lily honestly wasn't sure how much Scott and Sam got and how far she had to 'de-geek' her work. Neither of them were college graduates, but Lily knew that the education they had received at Xavier's hand had been more thorough than a typical preparatory school's and both of them had been forced to learn applied physics and mathematics to better control their mutations.

"Alsace threw a different monkey into the clockworks," she continued. "In that we knew it could change the nature of what we were looking for. We could have accommodated it as it stood within our old models, but if the destruction of the synagogue is really a by-product of an artifact retrieval, then we're looking at an entirely different set of results to the same set of equations. And Tom, this is your cue to take over."

Lily sat back in her seat as Tom, always very good at explaining complex mathematics to the innocent, began his presentation on exactly how the destruction of one of the oldest synagogues in the Alsatian region had fundamentally altered their projections. The bottom line was that all of their clues had been pointing towards those time streams that indicated a crisis that was purely political in nature and now were not. To the uninitiated, it would be counter-intuitive that removing the religious motivation behind the synagogue destruction actually increased the likelihood of a religio-cultural event. But much of fluid dynamics was counter-intuitive - starting with why Aristotle had gotten so much wrong - and Lily smiled as Tom fielded the inevitable questions. 

Tom's answer to one of Sam's questions led to a prolonged discussion on just how the religion factor could shake out and Lily was pleased to see that it had drawn everyone into it - normally, any meeting with the XSE command present tended to drift either towards the practical aspects, leaving Rob, Ubi, and Miri to sit quietly and watch, or it tended to get extremely technical and the XSE officers would start to get blank looks on their faces. But this time, Ubi and Rob both got involved in explaining the formulae for differentiating between social and non-social events to the XSE trio and they battled for supremacy on the projector screen as they used their tablets to transmit data to Pete's laptop. 

Lily looked down at her own tablet as a pop-up window appeared and flashed. It was an automatic notification telling her that the mainframe had spit out the results of the tests she'd set up for Alice, which shouldn't have gone to her under normal circumstances. Most of the lab's work went on without her oversight, supervision remaining in the hands of various department heads and team leaders, and even in situations where she actually had a hand in the work itself, such as setting up Alice's filters, it was not expected that her involvement would be daily or even constant. The results of Alice's filters should have gone to someone in the Fluids unit, who would have worked on the data until it was mathematically useful and then given it to Alice in a format that she could understand and Lily would have only learned of the results later on if they had been meaningful. 

There was a very small list of reasons why the raw data would be coming to Lily first and none of them were benign. 

She accessed the file and skimmed the results, her quick glance stopping cold once she hit the eighth filter. This was the one that had exploded, as Pete had put it. It was one of the ones that Lily had considered a waste of time because it had seemed too preposterous to be useful as a winnowing tool. You needed a few far-fetched events to define a sufficiently broad set of boundaries and Alice would sometimes get a little too creative, coming up with crazy situations that did very little to help classify elements of the solution set as not worth pursuing because of their improbability. Saying something was more likely to occur than, say, Vin Diesel winning an Academy Award was funny, but not ideal as a predictive algorithm because a lot of events fit that criteria and the solution set remained very large. 

But this filter hadn't been based on some implausible and amusing event and Lily couldn't have been more wrong about it being a waste of time. Pete wasn't a fluids person and wouldn't have been able to understand the particulars of _why_ the graph had turned out the way it had. Most of the time, 'exploded' was a euphemism for 'converges at infinity' because it meant that the possibility didn't exist. But this one didn't converge at infinity. What it did converge at, however, was much less important than what it did before that point. _This_ was why she had gotten a copy before the final treatments had been run. 

She didn't have to look up to know Nathan was watching her. She knew that she had more than adequate mental shielding for someone who was headblind, but she wasn't perfect and Nathan was perceptive. Raising her head to meet his glance, she let him read the seriousness of the situation in her face.

* _We may have a problem_ ,* she thought at him and mentally 'showed' him what she was looking at and what she thought it meant. 

# _Are you sure that's what it is?_ #

* _No, which is why I don't want to say anything just yet._ * She gave what she hoped was the mental equivalent of a frustrated sigh. * _This was supposed to be an extreme case, beyond our least upper bound. I'll look into it, but I'm not going to cause a panic until I know that this isn't a fluke or an accident._ *

Nathan 'said' nothing else, but gave a hardly perceptible nod and turned his attention back to where Miri was standing by the screen pointing out where the Switzerland point had been causing so many problems. His face was deceptively impassive. While Lily didn't even pretend to understand a fraction of what went on inside his head, she knew that he had to be... Be what? Angry? Upset? Nervous? Did Nathan even ever feel nervous? What could possibly be the reaction to finding out the foe that you had spent your life in preparation to fight and had successfully defeated was back from beyond the grave to haunt you just when you had settled into a new life? Whatever that reaction was, Nathan was keeping his close to the vest, focusing on Miri's gesturing and looking for all the world like he was actually paying attention to what was being said. 

Not that Lily expected to be let into Nathan's inner thought process, but that didn't stop her from feeling a little irritated at his outward placidity. It took effort to focus her own attention back to her tablet where she sent a short message back to Vic Fielder to tell him to process the results from the eighth filter immediately and with the highest security levels. When that was done, she shifted in her seat so that she could better follow along in the animated discussion the way Nathan had done with such ease, hoping all the while that they were not analyzing data that had just been proven irrelevant. 

* * *

"Lil? Do you think Piotr and Callisto would let us have Felix back?"

"I'm sure Callisto would be thrilled, but you'd have a hard time getting the idea past everyone else in that house. Why?"

"I sort of miss having a cat around."

"We have a kid. It's almost the same thing."

"Dane's really a lot better about eating things off the floor."

"True, but we've still got the small mammal who is often underfoot, leaves his toys all over the house, will do pretty much anything to avoid getting a bath, and eats five times his own bodyweight. You really want a second one?"

"Are you sure we're still talking about cats here?"

* * *

"I'm not saying it's not dirty pool. It is very dirty pool. But when you're in a real firefight and not a training drill with a couple of your classmates, dirty pool is not only allowed, but it is also occasionally encouraged."

The trio of cadets he had been practicing with was looking at him with various expressions. Morrison was almost casual in her acceptance - she was going to be a commander, Alex could tell. Okashi, competent if unimaginative during the exercise, just looked scared and Alex could only assume that he was finding real war games to be much more unpleasant than the video games he had grown up playing. Vyborny was the one challenging his methods, demanding to know why Alex had gone for the kill instead of letting the simulation go on. 

"It's a lot harder to force endgame when you're trying to keep casualties to a minimum," he told the younger man. Vyborny stood with his arms crossed in front of his chest, his face a mask of defiance that Alex alternately found amusing in its naïveté and concerning in its stubbornness. Robert Vyborny could be a good field soldier if he got the wax of newness sufficiently rubbed off of him. Or he could be the sort of stubborn jackass that got people killed through his own arrogance. "You have to learn to take the advantage when it's offered to you and not pass it up in some backwards notion of fair play. Especially if the other side has no compunctions against terminating your ass. There may have been little grace in how I finished them off, but there's a lot less grace in getting killed while looking for a more elegant solution."

"But..."

"But what, Cadet Vyborny?" A deep voice rumbled from behind Alex and he didn't have to turn around to know that it was his nephew. The three cadets going wide-eyed and snapping to attention in front of him was as much a confirmation as he needed. "Is the only good solution one that is guaranteed to confer a medal of commendation? You will have an illustrious career with that thinking, Vyborny. One that will have you polishing your medals for the funerals of the soldiers upon whose corpses you will have built that success."

The words were cold and the tone harsh, but Alex couldn't find it in himself to feel bad for Vyborny, who looked duly chastened -- or at least faked it well. The other two were trying to school their features to neutrality, but Alex didn't miss the glint of satisfaction in both Okashi's and Morrison's eyes. Obviously, this wasn't the first time something like this had happened. 

"Doctor Summers has seen more combat situations than you ever will even if you spend the next thirty years in the simulator," Nathan went on, his tone unsoftened. Cane or not, cripple or not, Nathan could still loom like the best of them and it was all Vyborny could do not to flinch. "If you do not have the wisdom to learn from him, then at least try to muster up the respect to keep your fool mouth shut so that your companions might."

Once upon a time, before Then, when Alex had been the carefree superhero, he would have felt bad for the kid. But after lifetimes spent in battles where too many funerals and mass graves had been visited, Alex couldn't muster the compassion for a kid whose defiance was most probably the result of his only experience coming via simulation. He had seen too many people he had grown to like die because of someone's ego. He himself had died more than once because someone wanted to be the hero instead of settling for merely being part of the winning team. It had been a cure for his own arrogance, or at least an elixir to transmute that arrogance into a more spare pride in his own competence. As a result, he identified with Nathan's reaction much more closely - you can't take chances by going into a fight with anyone about whom you had doubts. You don't want to go into a fight with anyone who is thinking more about posterity than the present. He understood Nathan a lot better in general these days and Alex was never sure how much of a good thing that was. 

But, here and now, this wasn't his fight and Alex merely nodded as Cadet Vyborny bowed his head in apology before all three saluted and were dismissed by Nathan. 

"Vyborny's an ego without an id, but I'm not sure how much of it is him and how much of it is something greater," Nathan said as he gestured with his free hand towards the elevator. "It's a problem we're having with the psis of that age group."

"Arrogance?" Alex asked, not bothering to hide his amusement. He had already showered and changed back into street clothes - experience having shown that both debriefs and teaching instruction went better when nobody was bleeding or stank - and followed along, measuring his strides so as to keep pace with Nathan's slower gait. "Hate to tell you this, nephew-o'-mine, but it's not a new phenomenon."

There was a flash of amusement in Nathan's eye, but it disappeared just as quickly and was lost within a frown. "This is different," he said sourly. "These kids manifested post-Merge and were immediately put into training and treatment. They've had none of the traumas most of us associate with emergent telepathy and all of the benefits of their abilities. Power unchecked by fear."

Alex nodded understanding. "God Syndrome." The kids only saw what they could do and not what they couldn't - or what others could do against them. Vyborny was a beta-level telepath; his arrogance was born of his assumption that he'd be able to 'see' a more spectacular conclusion to the exercise - it was chess to him and not a war simulation. It was the same sort of arrogance that felled villains in movies and in many of the X-Men's early adventures.

 "More or less," Nathan agreed, pursing his lips in wry amusement. "It's an unexpected side effect of life after the Merge. One that I should have anticipated better."

The elevator doors closed as Nathan pushed the button for the floor where his office was. Apparently, he wanted to talk, Alex mused, and it was typical of Nathan that he just assumed that Alex had both the free time and the inclination to do so. 

"Why?" Alex asked shortly. Age had not tempered Nathan's own version of God Syndrome. "Not much of what you experienced in the Thirty-Eighth Century is directly applicable here."

Nathan looked at him strangely before turning back to the opening elevator doors. "More and more of it is," he finally said as they started down the long hallway. It wasn't what he'd wanted to say, Alex knew, or at least it wasn't what the look had been about. "The Askani should have been example enough in this case."

Alex shrugged - what could he say to that one? - and waited for Nathan to unlock his office door. He'd been in this office a handful of times, been in Scott's more often and Logan's less. It was still _weird_ to see everyone with offices and secretaries and paperwork and bureaucracy to deal with. "Now that we're here, what's up?"

Nathan sat down somewhat gracelessly behind his desk and Alex couldn't tell if the look on his face was for the undignified way he had plopped into the chair or for Alex's question. 

"Not that I'm not your favorite uncle and all that, but..." he continued, gesturing with one hand vaguely as he trailed off. He sat down in one of the chairs in front of the desk.

"You're my only uncle," Nathan replied, then paused for a half-second as he realized that that was the joke, frowned, and then looked thoughtful. "I... I have not kept in touch with you, with your situation."

This time it was Alex's turn to look confused. "You never did, Nathan," he said uncritically even as he tried to imagine what his nephew could be up to. Nathan wasn't a 'let's do coffee' kind of guy and Alex just wanted to figure out what it was that Nathan wanted him to do before Nathan could spring it on him. "We've never been anything approaching close and half of the conversations we've had in the past dozen years wouldn't have happened if you didn't have a fascination with my wife's work."

Nathan's thoughtful frown deepened. "I don't mean socially," he replied, grimacing when Alex rolled his eyes at the obvious statement. "I know Scott and Logan have been the ones working with you on your training exercises and it was their idea that you run those 'tutorials' with the upperclassmen from the Academy and the junior officers, but... there are other aspects. I don't know that anyone is working with you on those."

Alex leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs at the ankles and rested his elbows on the armrests. It was a position of relaxation and it was intentional dissimilation - Alex was not especially relaxed at all. "Other aspects," he repeated sourly. "Like the ones my shrink deals with or the ones my wife deals with?" 

He was being catty; Alex knew Nathan meant nothing of the sort. But after six months of being constantly treated like a retarded child by everyone apart from his wife, being constantly 'checked up on' and unsubtly having his sanity verified, he allowed himself to be defensive. 

"You're the Nexus of All Realities, Alex," Nathan half-sighed, half-growled. "Your shrink can't help you with that."

"And you can?" It came out much more of a snarl than Alex had intended, but the incredulity wasn't that far off. He'd be the first person to admit that he didn't spend a whole lot of time contemplating that part of his identity - it was the part he least wanted to identify with because it was the one that had brought him the most pain. But he hadn't forgotten it was there - not when the nightmares still plagued him, when a smell or a sound or a taste could bring back powerful memories he'd much rather stay buried. And he was surprised to realize that he _resented_ Nathan's assumption that he was incapable of understanding it.

"I don't know," Nathan replied quietly, obviously realizing how he was coming across or at least how Alex was taking what he was saying. 

Alex willed himself to relax and raised his eyebrows, gesturing for Nathan to continue. 

"I don't know how much you've explored the different possibilities," Nathan began, this time sounding much less authoritative. "The potential for what you could be..."

"I know exactly what my potential is," Alex cut him off. Sitting up and leaning forward, he felt his ire rising again along with a swell of anguish and he angrily tamped them both down. "I can traverse realities without damaging them. I can violate laws of space-time for dimensions we haven't figured out exist yet and I can do it without leaving so much as a scratch. No ripples in the time stream, no loose threads in the fabric of reality, nothing. My potential is that I could be the unchallenged ruler of the multiverse - or I could be the tool of the one who would be. I'm not a baby telepath who doesn't realize what I've got, Nathan. I've had much longer than you've had to think about things."

Nathan didn't ever look chastened, but he was almost-not quite-maybe approaching it and that was the only reason Alex didn't get up out of his chair and storm out. 

"We're not completely dissimilar," Nathan said finally, looking not at him but instead at the picture of Domino and Clare that sat in a frame on his desk. "Different magnitude, different preparation, different reasons? Yes. But not all different. Lost in reality or lost in time, after a while it's just being lost. And whether you're being manipulated by an entity you can see and name or whether it feels like some unseen force of randomness, it's still being out of control and helpless. You find yourself focusing on what you left behind because it was yours and you don't look ahead because you don't want to see that there's nothing there for you..."

Alex watched in awe. The entire monologue had been delivered to the photo and there had been no eye contact, but it still constituted the most sincere and most _intimate_ exchange the two of them had ever had. Nathan had never really been an ally and he had certainly never been a friend. He had been a ruthless pain in the ass to all of the X-teams even after he had been revealed as the grown-up Christopher Nathan and even after all of the adventures involved in him manifesting the Phoenix Force, Alex had treated him with an element of bemused tolerance - more like Scott's frisky puppy than his time-tossed son. Nathan had never really become a _person_ to him. Even now, Nathan was closer to Lily than he was to him and would periodically call her 'Aunt Lily' just to get a reaction from her. So to hear these close-kept thoughts from him now...

"I don't think I can teach you anything, Alex," Nathan said, shaking himself out of whatever reverie he had fallen into. This time, he looked up at Alex and the feeling of intimacy was so uncomfortable that it was almost necessary to diminish it. "You don't need any more object lessons on what not to do. And if I can help you at all, it'll be self-serving: I need you to think about what you can do as the Nexus of All Realities instead of just what it takes you away from. Not taking over the multiverse, but... there's more to it than that. I need you to consider all of this."

" _You_ need," Alex repeated thoughtfully. "And I'm supposed to just smile, nod, and pretend I'm not noticing the absence of the first person plural, right?"

Nathan looked at him for only a moment before Alex felt his glance move beyond him and it was all he could do not to turn around to see what must be on the back of Nathan's door that could be so fascinating. Instead he sighed. "I know this isn't you reducing the XSE to the collective 'me,' Nathan."

"How much control do you have over where you go?" Nathan asked instead, his focus suddenly returning to Alex's face. 

"None that I can tell," he replied sourly. "What control I have is in sensing paths and patterns and changes, like what Lily does with her chronography graphs except I'm working on a reality scale instead of a time stream one. I can tell when realities merge or split or if something's come over from another reality. And you didn't answer my question."

Nathan sighed, as if he had been hoping to do just that. "Something's coming. I don't know what it is. _We_ don't know what it is. But I know that it's a crisis point. A nexus point that _has_ to go our way or else the last seven years have been a waste of time. And while everyone is doing all that they can to figure out what the flonq we're running headfirst into..."

"You want to make sure that the escape hatches work and the back doors open out instead of in," Alex finished with a knowing sigh. Knowing in the sense that he was sure whatever it was that Nathan was eventually going to ask him to do was going to be unpleasant. 

Alex tried to schedule his training sessions at the Tower during times when there were no Academy classes being taught and few junior officers around, but he knew everyone knew who he was. And he knew of the stories they told, each more incredible than the last, of where he had been and what he had done there. Some of them were half-true, others so wildly imaginative that Alex could only laugh, others still were closer to the truths that he had not yet grown the courage to tell. But the bottom line was that everyone accepted without a doubt that the mysterious Doctor Summers had killed and had killed often and Alex was sure that Nathan would eventually ask him to do what most of the X-types were still hesitant to do and kill again. 

"I suppose you could put it like that."

Alex laughed humorlessly. This, too, was Nathan - allowing the other person to believe whatever they wanted (or, rather, let people assume whatever first came to mind) until it actually became necessary for them to believe otherwise. He stood up and Nathan's body language didn't change to suggest that he should sit back down. "Just think about what you ask of me before you give it words. I'm not too eager to be experimenting with anything that could cost me my life in this reality _again_. Not when I've lost so much already and tried so hard to get some of it back."

Nathan looked as if he was about to speak and Alex cut him off with a wave of his hand. "Don't tell me I might not have a choice. Because there's always a choice, Nathan. Always. I learned that the hard way. Maybe your Askani ideas of 'what is, is' and never questioning why work on the time stream, but they don't work on reality. Creativity is pragmatism where I've been and I've died enough times to be pretty damned sure that resigning yourself to a bitter end doesn't solve anything and it only rarely makes things easier. There are a lot of stupid people in the multiverse, but the only real idiots are the truly fearless."

Nathan tilted his head thoughtfully for a moment and then nodded. "You are a very different person than you used to be," he said, sounding as if this was something of a revelation.

Alex barked out a laugh as he picked up his backpack. "No shit, Sherlock."

Nathan looked almost embarrassed, as if he had been caught being stupid. Which he had been, Alex noted with some pleasure. 

"I'll see you around, Nate," Alex said as he headed for the door. Before pulling it open, he turned around. "And tell whoever it is who's in charge of assignments that Morrison should get some extra small arms training. She's got above average tactical analysis skills, but can't do much more than fire her sidearm straight."

"I know," Nathan agreed, the mask of professionalism back perfectly in place. "Her final rotation is in the Rapid Response Unit; she'll get most of what she needs there."

Alex nodded and, with a final wave, opened the door and headed off. He passed by Scott's office, but his brother wasn't in. Logan was out in the field, he already knew, so he headed for the elevator and left. 

Unclipping his ID from his sweater as he headed outside, Alex checked his watch. There wasn't enough time to really get anything accomplished before it was time to pick up Dane from preschool, so instead he decided to just walk in that general direction and crossed West Street heading east. Dinner was taken care of already - Lily had promised to remember to pick up tofu for a stir-fry in return for him agreeing to take on tonight's round of teaching Dane how to use chopsticks. A co-worker of Lily's had given her 'training chopsticks', which were really just small regular ones tied to opposite ends of a small piece of foam, and while all Dane had to do to eat was squeeze, he was insistent upon learning proper finger placement. But his small fingers had trouble grasping and there was invariably a bit of flung food. 

The used bookstore on Varick across the street from the '80's dance club had a huge SALE sign in the window, so Alex stopped in. It was a small store, out of place among the clubs that dotted the landscape in the area and the all-night delis that catered to the club crowds, but it had a decent supply of academic books. Alex suspected it was because they paid more than the Strand did to acquire the castoff supplies of NYU, Baruch, Pace, and BMCC, all of which were located nearby. The owner and sole employee, a balding man with a gray ponytail and coke-bottle glasses, seemed to favor histories of radicalism and they vied for pride of place with the abundance of film studies texts (courtesy of NYU grads, no doubt) and environmental studies. The latter was what interested Alex because while he didn't really expect to find the sorts of specialized texts that he used, read, and even wrote now that Frohmeyer had tossed him back into the deep end of the pool and demanded a journal article on fluvial hydrology in the Andes, there were some charming examples of older surveys done before geology had gotten so politically trendy back in the 1990's and every new study had been almost required to be accompanied by a grief-stricken monologue on the imminent demise of the planet at the hands of cruel and wasteful humanity. 

Reminding himself that their apartment was crowded enough as it was, Alex limited himself to three books for himself and two for Dane - the children's section being right next to the desk set up as the cash register. 

"They don't make atlases like those anymore," the owner mused as he opened each book to see the penciled price inside. One of the books was a 1960's-era book of maps, complete with elevation and sea level charts. Alex had one at home, but the pages were starting to come loose and he'd accidentally created a new continent by putting them back in the wrong order last week. 

The two books for Dane, one about electricity (as if he didn't have enough of those) and the other about the American Morning Fire, were next. "Ah, let me guess: you've got a seven-year-old in the house?"

"Five last month," Alex corrected with a hint of pride. Dane was a reader, a fact that made both of his parents extremely proud. They'd be even more proud if their son exhibited any inclination to put his books away when he wasn't reading them, but that was a minor problem. And besides, his parents weren't all that good about doing it themselves, a fact that Dane was quick to point out. He wasn't much for 'do as we say and not as we do' in general. Annoyingly ethically consistent child.

The owner made an impressed face as he entered the total amount of the prices of the books into the calculator and then multiplied it by the tax rate. Alex handed him the cash, took back his change, and wished the man a good day. Once outside, he put the books in his backpack and debated taking out his sunglasses. It had been overcast earlier, but now the sun was breaking through. He decided not to; heading into the Village meant walking northeast, which meant his back would be to the sun most of the time and the tall buildings would provide shadows and shade even when it wasn't. 

Dane was in his usual good spirits when he came flying out the stairwell door at five to three. This was the last week of school before the summer, preschool ending earlier than the primary schools did, and much of Dane's day was spent practicing for 'graduation.' Alex wasn't sure of what to make of a preschool graduation - especially upon finding out from Piotr that there would be another one for kindergarten next year - but so far it seemed to entail a fair bit of singing. Dane liked singing and had been practicing his songs around the house and especially in the bath. He seemed to be rather disappointed that his parents didn't know the words and thus couldn't prompt him when he forgot.

"Your lunchbox seems awfully heavy," Alex told Dane as they crossed the street. With the hand that wasn't holding his son's, he shook the blue and green padded cloth box and felt two somethings bump inside. One was the resealable cup... "You didn't eat your apple?"

Dane made a face. "It was bruised and yucky."

"It was fine when it went into your lunchbox this morning," Alex told him with a frown as they went down the stairs to the subway and he let go of Dane's hand to fish out his Metrocard. Dane ran under the turnstile and waited on the other side. "What did I tell you about using your lunchbox as a weapon?"

Dane gave him that indignant look only a guilty child can make as he retook his father's hand. 

"We got you the soft kind so that it would fit into your backpack easier," Alex told him as they walked towards the rear of the platform. "If you're going to keep using it as a bola, we might as well just let you brown bag it."

"Do I have to bring lunch to camp?" Dane asked instead. Camp was the experimental program that was going to be run this summer on the Academy grounds - the mansion, as Alex still thought of it - for alpha-level mutant children. It was supposed to be part training and mostly socializing - a first chance for many of the children who would be attending to frolic without the constant concerns that their mutations brought to their daily lives. 

"We'll see," Alex said. He felt the wind in the station pick up a little and grasped Dane's hand a little tighter. The direction of the breeze meant that a train was coming on their side and Dane always liked to watch them pull into the station - from as close to the edge of the platform as he could get. 

The camp had been the brainchild of Jean and Ororo, Alex had heard, a way to try to recreate the relative freedom alpha-level mutant children enjoyed in the New Lands. While there had been some concerns from the public about a camp for children being run by and around the XSE, Kurt in particular had done a masterful job of selling the connection as almost coincidental. Camps were run on academic grounds all the time - even the military academies - and this would be no different with the added advantage of already being fitted-out to handle mutants not in full control of their mutations. Most of the counselors and staff would be coming from the New Lands - there was no summer vacation for the XSE itself - and any XSE-affiliated personnel who chose to become involved were doing it strictly as civilians. 

"Diego says that there's gonna be a bus," Dane confided as they waited for the people to exit the train. 

"There is," Alex confirmed, amused to hear that the two boys considered this privileged information. "You're going to be getting a lot of bus rides from now on. You're going to be taking the bus to and from kindergarten next year, too."

The train was a little more crowded than usual and Alex frowned when he saw no empty seats. He had been forgetful and now there was a delicate situation. No seats meant Dane had to hold on to a pole. In theory this wasn't a terribly big problem as Alex could stand directly behind his son and keep Dane from being either trampled or flung about should he lose his grip. But it was almost summer and Dane wore no gloves - he was in fact in jeans and a short-sleeved t-shirt - and it was a metal pole and there were other people holding on to it. While Dane had generally learned to control his electrical discharge, the end of the school day was a low point - it was sufficiently between meals and if Dane had forgotten to empty his surge protector, then it would be full by now. And there was no good way for Alex to either ask Dane if he had checked his ankle bracelet or assume that he hadn't without showing a lack of trust in his son. But neither could he put other people at risk solely for the sake of Dane's continued good cheer and happiness with his father.

"Daddy?" Dane asked in a small voice and Alex looked down, relief mixing with sadness as he realized that Dane had solved the problem on his own. His son was looking at him with a distraught face. "I kinda..." 

"It's okay," Alex said, crouching down and swooping his son up into his arms. If he leaned against the door, then he would be able to hold Dane until Penn Station, at which point they'd be able to get a seat for the one stop to Times Square. Even if the express wasn't already waiting there, they'd switch so that Dane could release his charge into the concrete of the station platform. He felt terrible, guilty for forcing Dane to make the admission of weakness when a little more care would have avoided the situation. But he was also proud of Dane for doing what had to be done, the sometimes-fragile dignity of a five-year-old being sacrificed for the greater good.

It wasn't until they were home and Dane was at the table gnawing on the 'unyucky' parts of his apple from lunchtime while carefully reading his new books that Alex let himself think about the discussion with Nathan. All throughout his trips through reality, Alex had never felt like he had had anything to lose. He had grown fearless because of that nihilism, willing to die during the execution of a bold plan even if there were some realities that he was less eager to move on from than others. It wasn't until his return that he'd realized just how much he actually had had to lose - and how he'd lost it all almost without a fight. And now, if faced with a situation where he'd have to lose everything again... No. He wouldn't think about it. He'd take his own damned advice and remember that there is _always_ another way. What he had now was too good to be sacrificed because of someone's narrow imagination.


	29. July-October 2012

"No, I'm not being overly protective about this. I'm being reasonable. He's very sensitive about the whole issue and... I'm not saying it can't be avoided. I'm saying that making an issue of it in a room full of people who still haven't gotten used to the changes he's undergone is just asking for a crisis... Yes it is. You saw him at Dane's birthday party back in May... How about a nice quiet dinner out?... I don't know, Piotr, Bobby and Cecilia... No, I don't think Callisto would come... It's not a locale thing, it's a social thing... All right. Talk to Scott... Yeah, you, too."

Lily set the phone down and turned back to her monitor and sighed. The idea was too phenomenally stupid to be Jean's, but so far her sister-in-law was refusing to name the true culprits.

"Lily, you wanted to see me?"

She looked up. Alice was standing there, fiddling with her hatpin. In the summer, Alice wore a lightweight hat instead of the wig she wore in cooler weather. There had been some sort of Jewish holiday the day before and Lily had left an email for Alice to come see her the following day. Today. 

"Yeah," Lily confirmed. "Grab your laptop and let's head to the tiny conference room."

If Alice was surprised that Lily wanted to go someplace so isolated, she didn't show it. Instead she nodded and disappeared into her neighboring cubicle, re-emerging with her laptop. 

"I need you to go on a wild goose chase," Lily began as she closed the door behind them. The tiny conference room was really just a small room with a door, a place where any one or any group of people could go to get either privacy or quiet, and it was used often enough that there had been no surreptitious looks as they had crossed the office. 

Alice gave her a skeptical look, but said nothing. 

"Those filters we ran back in March, your Armageddon Test Drives," Lily continued, sitting down. "Something came up in one of them that made me a little... nervous."

"That's the one I never got back, right?" Alice asked, opening up her laptop and typing quickly. 

"Yeah," she confirmed, leaning forward so that she could see what was coming up on Alice's screen. "I held on to that one. The equations it produced were sufficiently atypical that, well... Let me try this again. Back in the caveman days of chronography, before Akkaba even, when I was trying to convince myself that Nathan wasn't talking science fiction at me when he said that fluid dynamics could be used to predict things, I did some experimenting."

Alice sat back, looking both amused and intrigued. She had been one of Nathan's recruits, a network operative for five years before the preparations for Akkaba had even begun, and was one of the few people Lily felt guilty giving orders to. 

"The trials I ran were really incredibly crude simulations, just me trying to draw a direct correlation between the data-recorders' timeline and any sort of fluids problem it could even vaguely resemble," Lily went on, shaking her head at the memories. Her Buck Rogers days. "They were mapping data sets that we'd now consider utterly unusable, that we've never even bothered to try to use because they are so substandard. But at the time, they were enough to convince me that the idea had merit and..."

Alice smiled. "And a few months later, you were losing your voice in thrice-daily screaming matches with Fakliatore."

"Yeah," Lily agreed wryly. She had met Alice two months before Akkaba. They hadn't worked closely then, but Lily remembered her for her practicality - a quality in short supply among that group - and her level-headedness. Too many members of Nathan's network treated him like a deity, like this was a holy cause instead of a temporal one (pun intended). But Alice had her own faith and didn't need a new god and that, coupled with her acerbic wit and good cheer, had made her one of Lily's first choices two years later when she and Nathan had been putting together the staff for the New Lands lab.

"So something in that missing filter made you think of those early test runs," Alice mused, swiveling back in her seat to face her laptop. Lily was sure that Alice remembered precisely what the scenario for that filter had been. "Which, of course, should be a cause for concern because those filters were set up to be boundaries. And if the boundaries we set up as impossible aren't so impossible - or at least resemble something that is possible..."

Lily handed her a flash drive and Alice plugged it in. There was one file on it and she watched Alice's face as she skimmed the graphs and text. 

"Oh, my," Alice murmured. "Someone's been playing in Pandora's Box."

"And that's just the speculative part," Lily said, gesturing with her fingertip at the third graph. "This one, that's what got me nervous. The rate of flow there is in the magic range, the one that always gets us in trouble because it seems to be so easy to influence. And the function the sample produced... Pete said it exploded, but it didn't. Not like we usually mean it. That jump discontinuity right there, _that_ is where I need you to start chasing down things that might not exist. Because the left side produces a lovely outcome and the right side..."

"Wouldn't look good if you dressed it up in a tuxedo," Alice finished with a sigh of understanding. They needed a basis for other outcomes, a basis that might not exist. "We're going up against probability theory and hoping to win."

"Pretty much," Lily confirmed. "But here's where it gets tricky: we need to do this on the side and on the sly. The timeline that we've all been busting our humps to work on is valid, I'm sure of it. Ever since we solved that problem with Switzerland and Jordan and focused on the Alsace, I've been convinced that it's going to be a huge part of whatever goes down. And we need to keep working on it, keep adding to it, and most importantly keep attention focused on it. Because if this," and here she paused to gesture to the screen, "gets out too far, we're looking not only at a panic, but also at a lot of corrupted data."

Alice nodded resolutely and highlighted the last sentence of the last paragraph. "Those three words will wreck everything HisDAs does surer than anything," she said. "Contamination isn't even the word. All right. So this stays with me and me alone. How are you going to get the rest of the work done?"

Lily smiled crookedly. "Divide and conquer," she replied. "The only ones who know what's going on will be you and me because I can't keep you clueless and still expect anything approaching reasonable historical data analysis. As for everyone else, I'm going to be assigning this out like any other top-level project, but without the support info and the expectation of absolute silence. We can't expect perfect discipline there, but everything will be too discrete for anyone to make any sort of connection. Tom's got most of the day-to-day with the timeline covered and he and Amy Dominguez can keep that train on track without a problem. Do you see a problem with shifting most of your current workload back to the rest of HisDAs?"

Alice narrowed her eyes in thought for a moment. "Short term, no. Sagerstein, that mental midget, will be thrilled to have all of the marbles to play with for a while. I've been working mostly with Eric Corrado on the timeline and I'm not worried about him getting herded by Sagerstein. After this is all over... We'll see. Possession being nine tenths of the law and all that, reestablishing the balance of power might be a problem, but that's not something I am going to worry about before then."

"All right, then," Lily said with a nod. "We're on."

Three hours later, she was returning from her abbreviated lunchtime stroll - July in midtown not being the most pleasant weather to be wandering about - and noticed that Alistair Ngeda, the XSE NCO currently assigned to the lab's reception area, was sitting up a little straighter than he normally did. And there was no magazine open in front of him.

"What happened, Al?" she asked as she cheekily showed her ID badge. "Someone stop by?"

Someone, of course, being an XSE commanding officer. Nobody else in the lab would have ever told Alistair that he couldn't read at his desk. Midday Sun was not a frequently visited office. Throw in the fact that Sergeant Ndega was wearing two firearms he knew how to use and was stationed at the mouth of a vestibule with no other exit and his due diligence was due enough.

Alistair looked a little... deflated. "Commander Guthrie's still here, ma'am," he replied. 

" _Sam_ barked at you for reading _Sports Illustrated_?" Lily was surprised. She'd have thought it was Scott or Logan or Kurt who would have said something. Sulven and Domino had no real reason to visit, but if they had they wouldn't have cared, and Nathan would have teleported straight inside.

"Said I didn't look like an authority figure all slouched as I was, ma'am," Alistair answered. "And he's right."

"Well, I won't argue matters of posture with Commander Guthrie, but as long as you're not dozing or reading skin magazines, you're free to do what you will at your station," she told him. "Now let me go see what the Commander wants from us civilians, eh?"

It turned out that Sam was there to speak to Tom as Lily found the two of them sitting at the small table in Tom's cubicle. Sam had his back to her, but Tom saw her and if there had been anything she'd needed to know, he'd have waved her over. But he didn't, so Lily went back to her desk and settled in to her work.

"If I didn't know better, I'd say you enjoyed settin' everyone off like you do."

Lily jumped, startled by the sudden voice. Sam had one hand on the short cubicle wall and was leaning on it. He looked amused in that understated way he had.  His 'amused at grown-ups look' was how Alex put it, as opposed to the more open glee from taking care of his children.

"Come in, sit down, and tell me what I did this time," Lily told him, standing up to shake his hand. Sam only got a hug in his civvies, but the fact that she didn't bite his head off straightaway for trying to meddle was enough of a sign of affection. Sam was listened to precisely because he knew giving advice was a privilege, not a right. 

"Whatever you said to Jean's got her upset at Scott who's takin' it out on me which is why I hand-delivered the files I could have had my aide email," Sam reported with a frown. "So what did you say and how soon is it goin' to blow over?"

Lily furrowed her brow. It was unlike Sam to either run and hide from the invariable bleed of personal and professional lives that happened when the XSE command was basically a family business or to gossip about it. Even to others who were caught trying to straddle the same blurry line. "You sure it's me?"

"I'm sure," Sam confirmed wryly. "Even if I hadn't been privy to the use of proper nouns, you are a repeat offender."

Genuinely confused, Lily shrugged. "I spoke to Jean earlier about her suggestion for having a surprise party for Alex, but she didn't sound that upset. If it's that, then I'm surprised. Anything else and I'm utterly mystified."

Sam looked thoughtful for a moment and then nodded. "Makes sense now."

Lily waited for him to elaborate, but he didn't. 

"Has anyone told you this week that you are getting too much like Nathan for your own good?" she asked tartly. "Spill, Guthrie."

"I think we're both getting caught up in something that's bigger," he explained, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "It's to do with Alex, but... This party idea, it wasn't Jean's really. But she's stuck being the mouthpiece. I think everyone's been feelin' a little... guilty. For not makin' a bigger effort to be part of Alex's life - and yours and Dane's, too - now that he's back. Or at least for not understanding him better, understanding how he's changed. It's taken a while, but the fact that he's not the same old Alex has finally gone all the way through the grape vine."

This was _precisely_ why she'd gotten so angry, but undoubtedly sensing that Lily was too peeved to say anything that she'd end up regretting, Sam held his hands up in a calming gesture. 

"I know, I know. It's about damned time everyone noticed," Sam soothed. "Reflexes aren't the only things that slow with age. But give'm points for trying."

"Why?"

"Because it's new territory for everyone," he sighed. "Hear me out before you get all indignant. We used to be together _all the time_. And we had no outside lives to distract us and no time apart and it was like growin' up with a family - you don't notice the little changes 'cause you were there for the entire process. And then you go away for a little while and when you come back, everything's different. Every _one_ is different. That's just how it goes. But it didn't go that way for us for such a long time, like some weird arrested development."

Sam looked sad now and that kept Lily from snarling. "I'm not going to let Alex be part of their learning curve."

"He already is," Sam replied. "Everyone's feelin' guilty not because they've not been taking the new Alex as... seriously... as they should have. And they haven't and you're probably right. But they're feelin' guilty because they're realizing they didn't know the _old_ Alex as well as they had thought. They're seeing that they don't understand the changes because they aren't as sure as they thought they were about where he started. And it's embarrassing to them 'cause they're supposed to be Alex's friends, the ones who knew him the longest and the best."

"But..."

"Alex was always different from everyone," Sam cut her off, although that was what she had been meaning to say. "The first to quit the team, although apparently he and Alison Blair used to argue about that, and the one who always dreamed of just livin' a quiet life somewhere doing something that had nothing to do with being a mutant. When Akkaba came and went and suddenly we were all free to go be _people_ as well as heroes, you and Alex were already there. You had your own friends, your own careers, your own _home_. You guys were ahead of us all. Still are, I guess."

"I'm not going to argue that, Sam, but I'm not going to feel sorry for anyone, either," Lily insisted, slouching in her chair. It was a childish expression of obstinacy, the way she'd slink down to make it harder for her father to come and pick her up and put her to bed.  "Ignorance, coping mechanism, delayed shock from finally having to pay their own utility bills, whatever it is I don't care if the cure for it is hurting Alex."

Sam made some sort of frustrated noise and ran his hands over his face and into his hair. But he looked more grim than anything else when he finally looked up at her. "You don't have to care, Lily. Hell, I've given up on everyone enough times that I feel a bit of a hypocrite being the one to tell you to be tolerant. But I'm still the one telling you to be tolerant. They're not being malicious, so you just gotta forgive them as best you're able to. It's part of being a family. And you and Alex may be the most precocious ones in the family, but you're still in the family."

A thousand different replies came to mind, but Lily honestly didn't have the heart to utter any of them. Not with Sam looking so _pleadingly_ at her. So she closed her eyes. "Stop looking at me like that," she muttered. "You're impossible to snark at when you look at me like that."

"Why do you think everyone says I'm the nice one in the family?" Sam asked instead, sounding very amused. "I know how to work it."

This time she laughed, opening her eyes and laughing harder when Sam sat back and winked. 

"Now," he went on, clapping his hands onto his knees and sobering slightly. "This birthday party business. I'm assuming the problem is that Alex's head and his body aren't exactly in sync with his birth certificate anymore."

Lily nodded, mentally smacking herself for not realizing that she had had an ally the entire time in Sam. "That's it in a nutshell."

Alex considered himself to be turning thirty-five and there was really no good argument against it - wherever his corporeal form had been hiding while he had been traipsing through realities, it hadn't been anywhere it could age. Alex's body _was_ turning thirty-five. And he had spent so many years in so many realities, a mental age would put him in the hundreds or something. Lily still wasn't sure if Alex had any real estimate -- or if he knew to the day and he didn't want to say. 

"I understand," Sam said simply. "I'll see what I can do about defusing the party idea. Everyone's kinda used to me not being too keen on celebrating birthdays anymore, either, so that should carry some weight. But you and I both know that the party was just the poorly designed conclusion to a problem that won't go away.  So how 'bout I make you a deal?"

"A deal?" Lily repeated warily. 

"You guys make your damnedest effort to show up at the party Jean and Scott are going to throw for the anniversary of Akkaba _and_ you make sure you guys are there for the twins' birthday party and I'll make everyone forget about Alex and birthday parties."

Lily smiled. "Of course we're going to be at the twins' birthday party. Colin and Ray are the nephews we actually like."

Sam, witness to many of Lily's battles of wills with Nathan, chuckled. "Both or nothing, though. Is it a deal?" 

"It's a deal," she agreed, shaking the outstretched hand. "And thank you, Sam. Really and truly."

"It's what family does," he replied with an almost bashful shrug. "All right, now I better get back to the madhouse 'fore anything _else_ goes wrong."

With that he left and Lily was eventually able to concentrate back on her work. She wasn't going to have time to talk to Alex about all of this until much later tonight or probably tomorrow as they were going out. Ji-Won and Kyung were in town - they were expecting their first child early next year and were getting in one last visit home (to Ji-Won's family in New York and Kyung's in Philadelphia) which in turn had prompted Sanjay and Adrian to move their vacation plans up to coordinate. Alex was excited about the evening - he had seen Sanjay and met Adrian on a trip to London after a British Geomorphological Research Group event he had attended back in April, but Lily herself had been the last person to see Ji-Won face-to-face back when she was living in the New Lands. 

* * *

"I'm going to school. Why do you need a picture of me going to school?"

"It's your first day of kindergarten. I want to have something to remember the occasion."

"You didn't take a picture of me when I went to school last year."

"Dane, smile for the camera or your mother is never going to let us leave."

"How come you didn't take a picture of me last year?"

"Because I wasn't feeling silly and emotional and your father wasn't here to make fun of me. Now stop making a face. And hold up your lunchbox."

"Don't blame this on me! I accept no blame for you getting all gooey and sentimental."

"It was your idea to send a picture to our parents."

"Mommy, can I _please_ go to the bus now?"

* * *

"You're serious?"

Joe Perotelli looked at Lily over his glasses, eyebrows raised in disbelief. They were sitting on a bench eating pizza during a break between the grad seminar he had taught and she had sat in on and the talk she was giving later on that afternoon where he would return the favor. It was a warm day for Boston in October and the campus was alive with students and faculty alike enjoying the last gasp before the New England winter set in for real.

"Yeah," she confirmed, wiping her mouth with one grease-stained napkin. "I'm serious. Would I have a chance if I applied?"

Perotelli snorted as he sipped at his straw. "Yeah, although I'm telling you now that you'd face the same questions Yenette did when we hired him the last time you applied: why in heaven's name would you leave a cushy lab job to teach? I mean, Yenette was running from a scandal, but you, you're in a custom-made spot in a field you're mostly responsible for its existing at all."

The job opening had been mentioned casually; Ilya Simonov was retiring and one of the two fluids experts was taking a job in British Columbia and the department wasn't ready to offer a tenure-track position to the other one. 

"Because my cushy lab job isn't cushy," she retorted after swallowing. Santarpio's pizza was definitely on the short list of things she missed about Boston. "Because I hate working eighty-hour weeks when most of that time is spent being a bureaucrat. I don't get to do a lot of research anymore and I'm running out of time where that can be my primary focus. I want to write an article on something _I_ am interested in instead of writing summaries for projects that others need done."

Perotelli nodded sympathetically, but his brow was still furrowed. "Is this your frustration talking or are you seriously interested?"

Lily didn't pause. "I'm serious. Alex and I have been talking about it. Not about here in particular but returning to teaching in general." 

It was an oversimplified answer, but Lily wasn't at liberty to say more. At least with respect to work. The rest was just personal. She and Alex had spent a lot of time in the last month discussing changes - jobs, children, ambitions, everything. Alex would be back a year next month and it was time to start planning and get away from merely adjusting. Dane was starting school and Alex had been deemed one article away from being employable (he was currently on a one-year post-doc) and it was an opportunity to make significant changes without too much scarring. 

More immediately, Lily was more sure than ever that she wanted to leave the lab - the pressure that was building up both within the chronography groups and within the XSE was getting too much to bear. She was furious that she was often stuck in the middle of arguments that had nothing to do with her for no other reason than because she was party to Nathan's chronal secrets. She'd already told Nathan that she was quitting after things quieted down. 

"We're formally announcing the opening at the beginning of next week," Perotelli said with a shrug of his shoulders as he reached for another piece of pizza. "Interviews will probably be around Thanksgiving, depending on who we get. It's an endowed chair, so..."

Lily nodded. Extra hoops to jump through. 

Four hours later, Lily was standing on the bottom step of the dais in the lecture hall chosen for the event, answering questions and trying to sound witty and knowledgeable without giving away specific details of what she was working on. The time stream was sensitive like that - mention the right bit of information to the wrong person and you'd come back to work to find all of your projections changed. 

"Doctor Summers," a loud voice rang out from behind the group gathered around her. The step she was standing on gave her a chance to see over people's heads who was calling for her and it was all she could do not to groan. 

Harvard's Poppy Mercer was one of the most controversial faculty members at the fortress across the Charles. And she was standing on a chair with a do-damage look in her eyes.

Mercer was technically an American historian, but what she had to say had very little to do with history. Only a few years older than Lily, Mercer was one of the more egregious examples of how far academic activism could go if unchecked by anything approaching reality. Her cause was reparations - what America owed the world - and she had made her career calculating the cost of each slight perpetuated by the US upon helpless victim nations. The Monroe Doctrine, according to the one article Lily had read, was the biggest item on the list because it was the root of all of the poverty and disease in Latin America. There were separate tabs for almost every nation - America owed the former Soviet Union, for example, because had they not kept escalating the Cold War, the Politburo might have fed its starving masses or built up its infrastructure instead of funding the army.  

There had been an article in the _New York Times_ the other month about how a small-but-growing segment of Harvard's alumni benefactors were pushing for Mercer's dismissal. Down in the New Lands, Roger Marlowe kept a file on Mercer - she had already been cited seven times in the manifestos of prominent terrorist organizations. Lily had seen a few of the items in the file and at first had been incredulous that such wild claims could be taken seriously. But Mercer's books were best sellers and she made a fortune on the lecture circuit, not to mention the prestigious award she had received two years ago from the International Court of Justice. 

"Doctor Summers," Mercer called out again, her loud voice carrying easily in the suddenly quiet hall. Lily could almost taste the anticipation of conflict in the people standing around her. Like sharks smelling blood in the water. "Is it not true that what you are here propagandizing is basically a twenty-first century version of the Manhattan Project? Is not Chronography the new A-bomb? You said, and I quote, 'Chronography could provide us with a mathematically precise prescience.' Isn't that just a nice way of saying that it's a powerful tool that could enable anyone with an understanding of it to force a future that serves their own needs? Aren't you just handing over the treasure chest to the dictators and warmongers and other forces of evil?"

Lily fought back her own irritation at her words - and chronography itself - being so blatantly misrepresented. This is how Mercer operated, by comparing apples and oranges and shouting down anyone who dared point out that the units were incommensurable. 

Out of the corner of her eye, Lily could see Arnaud Maldouf standing next to Perotelli. They both looked cautious and concerned, but not worried enough to break in.

"First off," Lily began, raising her voice to be heard but trying her best to keep it level and calm. "You left out the important part of the sentence you quoted. I said that _eventually_ chronography could provide us with a mathematically precise prescience. Not now, not in the immediate future, but eventually. To imply, as you did, that such a thing is possible now is either putting too much faith in current research or blatant misrepresentation. Eventually is a long time and many things could happen between now and then."

"But what about..."

"Let me finish, Professor Mercer," Lily interrupted, using the strength of voice she had inherited from both her father, who could make himself heard across the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, and her grandfather, one of Fort Campbell's most infamous drill instructors. Mercer stopped short and Lily swore she heard a titter of laughter from the growing throng of witnesses. 

"You asked several questions and I would answer them all," she went on in a more normal tone. "The connection you drew between the Manhattan Project and the study of Chronography is a false one, but we can still salvage it. Nuclear energy gave us the atomic weapon, but to say that it's solely a _bad_ thing is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Microwave ovens. The irradiated milk that can be stored without refrigeration and be used by aid organizations to help ease hunger and malnutrition throughout the world. The advances in medicine that come from X-rays and the survival of cancer patients receiving radiation treatments. The benefits to the environment from clean nuclear energy instead of fossil fuels. There are a ton of examples of the _good_ things nuclear energy has brought us that the world has decided far outweigh the danger posed by atomic weapons that haven't been used in sixty-five years."

She paused for a moment to reach over to the podium and retrieve her water glass, smiling self-effacingly at the crowd watching the impromptu debate. Poppy Mercer merely looked belligerent and impatient.

"We research and improve upon countless ideas that could - and sometimes do - have a negative aspect," Lily began again after sipping at her water. "We live with them every day - without cars, there would be far fewer fatal accidents, right? Could chronography be dangerous in the wrong hands? Once it is advanced enough to be reliable in _any_ real situation, of course it could be. But it could also save lives we've never been able to save. Imagine knowing in advance about a flood or an earthquake or a drought. Imagine being able to prepare for a natural disaster on that scale the way we do for a hurricane. Would you not see that benefit as outweighing a possible misuse? Chronography requires intensive manpower and a broad spectrum of specialized knowledge - it's not a gun. It can't be used to cause damage by anyone who can pick it up."

"But once it's being misused, it's not as relatively harmless as a gun, which is only dangerous while you have bullets," Mercer insisted, sounding confident as if she had tricked Lily into saying something she shouldn't have. "Chronography could be used to assure a permanent dominion. A dictator for eternity."

Lily was very glad that Poppy Mercer had no access to the details of the rise of En Sabah Nur.

"It's still dangerous," Mercer reiterated, a slight smile of victory on her face.

"So is standing on a chair in heels without holding on to anything," Lily retorted. "But you're doing it anyway because you believe the reward outweighs the risk."

The assembled crowd laughed and Mercer paused to let them quiet down before she said anything else. But she never got the chance.

"And on that note of impasse," Perotelli announced in a loud voice, "Let us adjourn to the reception area for some much needed refreshment. Thank you to Doctor Summers and to our esteemed visitor from enemy territory."

A round of applause followed and Lily smiled to well-wishers as she made her way towards the door. Mercer was obviously staying behind; perhaps to avoid a more direct confrontation but Lily didn't really care. She headed towards the ladies room and then on to the reception area set up in a large classroom emptied of chairs. As she crossed the room towards the tables set up with hors d'oeuvres and wine, she could hear the murmur of conversation and it was all on the topic of Mercer's appearance. Three different people stopped her to congratulate her on surviving the experience, Lily was pleased to note.

"Well _that_ was something I didn't expect," Perotelli sighed when Lily found him. He handed her a glass of wine and made a face. "The Great Poppy Mercer deigns to cross the Charles to rain havoc upon the poor Mechanical Engineering department. I suppose you should feel flattered she took time off from demanding we raise taxes to pay off our 'moral debt' to Cuba."

"Flattery like that I can live without," Lily grumbled, sipping the wine. Especially as it meant she'd have to call Roger and have him update all of their files on her. Chronography didn't have many enemies just yet, but it looked like Mercer would be an early one.

"Just think," Perotelli mused with a grin. "If you come up and teach here, you'd be in her constant line of fire. She's working hard to entrench herself as Boston's most important public intellectual."

"Is it working?"

"Only with the undergrads," he replied, waving at someone Lily didn't see. "The old New England bluebloods aren't about to take her seriously."

"Ah, Lily," Arnaud Maldouf called as he approached from behind her. Lily turned to see him smiling warmly and accepted a peck on the cheek as he clasped her hand in both of his. "Would that our hospitality included screening our visitors."

"What's life without a little excitement?" she asked in return, smiling. "It's a change of pace. Instead of someone yelling at me why I haven't done something yet, I have someone wanting to know why I have."

Poppy Mercer was probably no easier to argue with than Nathan, anyway, Lily thought to herself and then frowned, realizing that she'd have to talk to him as well about this. 

Maldouf smiled wanly. "That woman is a scourge," he muttered. "The very idea of her crossing over into the sciences to pick her next fight..."

"She's a bully," Perotelli said, reaching behind him to snag a carrot stick off of the vegetable tray. "She only goes after those who can't or won't fight back and the self-important mental midgets who everyone thinks deserve to be publicly humiliated anyway. It's mostly politicians and junior faculty. And the public eats it up because its entertainment. Diana calls her Harvard's Huey Long."

Lily and Maldouf laughed. Diana was Joe's wife, an economics professor at Smith. Lily had met her a few times over the years - the Perotellis lived in Northampton, by Smith, and Joe kept an apartment in Cambridge for the part of the week he was on campus. 

The conversation drifted off into other matters, periodically getting dragged back to Mercer by the stream of people who stopped by to greet Lily, before the event ended. Lily had to turn down dinner - she was tired and wanted to get back to New York before it was too late. On the train home, she checked her email to see what had been happening at the lab during the day and composed a quick note to both Nathan and Roger detailing the ambush by Poppy Mercer, but she was still able to close her eyes and doze by the time the train left Hartford.


	30. November 2012

"So how's the little Gretzky doing?" Jean asked and Alex beamed with pride at her. 

"A little Gordie Howe is a bit more like it," he replied, putting his other arm into the sleeve of his jacket and picking up his backpack. "Took an elbowing penalty and a roughing penalty last night. And he scored twice. Naturally, he's more proud about the time in the sin bin. That's Lily's fault."

He'd come down to the Tower for a practice session - a solo workout rather than scaring the crap out of some junior officers - and was on his way back uptown to get some work done before Dane got home from school. They normally did their 'homework' together at the kitchen table, but it was easier for Alex to do tasks that involved his full concentration when his son wasn't around; he'd leave the maps and tables and data verification for later, when he'd be interrupted every few moments to listen to Dane read aloud or to check his arithmetic. Chronological morphology had never been his thing, but it was required for his just-completed project and he wanted to reread an old paper he'd written on methods of gathering abiotic information before writing up his report.

Jean smiled and shook her head. "Don't blame her."

A couple of junior officers walked by and made obeisances at Jean, who nodded at them in return.

"It _is_ her fault," Alex insisted, rolling his sore left shoulder. He'd tripped and fallen awkwardly off of a short escarpment in Peru last week, an inauspicious beginning to what was a rather successful project. "All of the other mothers at least pretend to look disapproving."

Jean knew better than to argue the point. "How's the shoulder?" she asked instead. "And what happened? Scott said that you fell off a cliff."

"A very short cliff," he replied, wincing as the joint popped loudly. "Damned paleohydrologists are so focused on what the soil saturation level was three million years ago that they occasionally forget to keep track of what's going on now. As in not bothering to say 'don't stand there, the soil at the edge is too dry to support your weight'. But it's just a bruise and I got back at them by melting the catches on their toybox." 

Jean raised an eyebrow. "And Dane turning into a little hockey goon is all Lily's fault, you say?"

Alex shrugged with his good shoulder and tried to look guileless. 

"I gotta tell you, though, it felt great being out in the field again," he said when Jean's look of disbelief only grew. "Not sitting safe inside at the computer and looking at satellite pictures and computer models. I'm so sick of AirSAR."

"Big surprise there, Mister Former Superhero," Jean snorted. "Was this for your post-doc?"

"Nah," Alex sighed, moving with Jean towards the window as they could hear the dissonant footfalls of a group of people approaching. A gaggle of first-year cadets, presumably here for a class, walked past. 

" _That_ involves a lot of sitting around looking at satellite pictures and computer models," he explained ruefully. The post-doc hadn't been his idea; it had been Frohmeyer's. His former advisor had explained that it was getting harder and harder for a geologist to get good field opportunities without being affiliated with a university. And Alex had been gone too long for his own accomplishments to stand on their own without some more traditional academic credentials to buttress them. Hence the postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth. That he was the Nexus of All Realities and still needed to polish up his CV to be employable amused Lily to no end.

" _This_ was a job audition," he went on. "My old advisor felt pity on me and got me an interview with Hastings-Farraday, which is a super-specialized geological consulting firm. They help clean up massively funded projects that are going badly - when it's too late for the team to save face and all you can do is save part of your investment, you call them. They're like the Delta Force of geology. They cater mostly to museums and government agencies; universities would usually rather lose the cash than 'fess up to blowing it."

Jean rolled her eyes knowingly and Alex gestured that he knew she knew what he was talking about. Jean was very much involved in the Academy's management and could easily be sparked into a rant on the bureaucracy of education. 

"Oh, yes, universities would rather do a lot of things rather than confess to being wrong," she muttered darkly. "I'm working with twenty-five kids at four different colleges who are getting shafted because the registrar's computer system didn't have a code for ROTC and won't put Academy classes on transcripts despite agreeing that they belong there."

It had been decided that college degrees would be required for service in the XSE, although many of the current corps were being grandfathered in. Cadets who hadn't already been through college were enrolled jointly in the Academy and any of a long list of local schools. Setting up the program had involved a massive amount of work and Alex and Lily, the academics, had been pleasantly surprised by the willingness of most of the Tri-State area colleges and universities to participate. The three Ivies within acceptable travel distance - Columbia, Yale, and Princeton - had all been among the first to sign on. Perversely, it was mostly the third-rate local private colleges that had balked; a relatively small inconvenience as the Academy was sending few students to them but an affront on the more basic level as the refusals were openly assumed to be because of anti-mutant sentiment.

"Anyway," Jean said in a determinedly cheerful voice. "Do go on."

"So they packed me off to Peru to help bail out the Instituto Geográfico Nacional," he complied. "I did well considering that paleo-anything isn't really my thing. They'll probably hire me as a stringer until I get a real job and then maybe I can get a spot on the permanent roster. At least I hope so."

"They'll hire you only after you get another job?" Jean asked, screwing her face in a mask of confusion.

From down the hallway, towards the training rooms, someone could be heard yelling. A door opened and the voice got louder and it was all the two of them could do not to wince in sympathy as Domino's harangue became clearly audible. Apparently, her session was not going well. A senior cadet came running from the room, past them, and on to the stairs without even looking up and Alex and Jean exchanged mystified looks. 

"It's not full-time work and it looks fancier if I can put an affiliation after my name." He made a face to indicate that yes, he understood it sounded petty. "The bureaucrats whose millions I'm saving like titles, so..."

"So you're finally bowing to The Man and getting a real job?" Jean asked, a wicked grin playing on her face. "Your days of fighting the establishment are over?"

"I was what, twenty-two when I said that?" Alex whimpered. He hated telepaths. They all had memories like elephants. "Why do you always remember every silly thing I did as a kid?"

"Alex, you're technically forty, your body is thirty-five, and you look young for that," she told him sternly, waggling a fingertip at him. "I'm forty-two and feel sixty and I'm about to run a group session with Sam, who still looks twenty-five. If I want to relive the halcyon days when I was young and carefree and didn't have a more intimate knowledge of the process for accreditation of a university-level facility than I do of my own husband, I am going to do so."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Don't do that," Jean growled in frustration. "I have enough fresh-faced little cadets doing that to me."

Alex laughed. 

After a few more minutes of chatting - Jean informed him that the twins had become little celebrities at the Academy after their debut in the course on psi-shielding - they realized that the hallways were slowly filling. 

"I guess I should go and get changed," Jean said reluctantly. "I want to look my best when I run Sam and his little tactical team into the ground."

Alex snorted. It was a psis-versus-headblind training session; Sam had the strategy advantage, but Jean's telepathic power was really a lot stronger than most people realized and it would be an interesting exercise.

They said their goodbyes and Alex headed home.

There was a message on the machine from Joe Perotelli for Lily; he suggested that she come up with a syllabus for a course in chronography as it applied to fluid dynamics. Alex saved the message, not sure why Joe would have called the house instead of Lily's cell. She was formally applying for the position at MIT; it was a job he'd always known she'd be interested in pursuing and there were enough universities in and around Boston that he'd have a decent selection from which to beg a job of his own if MIT didn't end up offering him something as a sweetener to Lily. 

A few hours later, Alex was faced with a horror greater than the search for employment: the calendar of weekends for which students in Dane's class could sign up to be responsible for the class guinea pig. Alex had no desire to foster parent a guinea pig. He was sure Lily wanted it even less. But Dane was looking at him with saucer eyes and discussing where in his room it could go and Alex chided himself for chickening out by telling Dane that the decision would have to wait until his mother got home.

* * *

"So this is it. The last blue one on the disc. No refill in the drawer."

"Should we have some kind of ceremony or something?"

"To commemorate my last birth control pill? I wouldn't go that far."

"You do realize that our luck being what it is, now that we're actually intentionally opening up the possibility of having another child, it's going to take us a while."

"What are you talking about? Look at your brother. Look at your nephew. Look at yourself. I'm going to end up getting pregnant before I'm supposed to be able."

"That's what I mean. Nobody else was trying. The Summers clan is all one giant accident."

"While that really goes quite a bit towards explaining your family, I'm not putting too much stock into that holding true."

"Time will tell, I guess."

"I guess... Although..."

"Second thoughts?"

"I'm just thinking that my timing could have been better - we have Clare's birthday party next weekend and a house full of screaming children isn't exactly going to make me feel all warm and fuzzy about our decision."

"I think the timing is very good - had the party been last weekend, you'd have gone to the drugstore to refill the prescription the day after. Besides, it can't be as bad as being a parent chaperone on a kindergarten field trip."

"You're still not over that, are you?"

"The trauma's going to last a while, I think. Five of them burst out crying when we went to see the Blue Whale. They thought it was going to fall on them."

"Dane's always more disturbed by the squid."

"Dane's bravado below the squid was admirable. Probably related to a certain brunette named Roberta, but admirable."

"Like father, like son."

"Hey!"

"Go ahead. Deny it. I dare you."

"..."

* * *

"You know, in all the years of fighting, I never thought that this would be the reward," Scott said quietly as he walked towards where Alex and Piotr were sitting. He pulled up a lawn chair and joined them at the edge of the grass closest to the boathouse. "It wasn't that I was so sure I was going to die or anything, but I never dreamed of another generation. Of us bringing that next generation into the world."

The X-Men had had to be on call all the time, but XSE officers were on a regular schedule and that meant not only duty rosters but also official days off. As a result - or perhaps even as overcompensation, Alex thought - everyone was now living spread out around the northeast instead of clustered at the mansion. But the distance was still unfamiliar and almost any event would be used as an excuse to bring the families together. It was Clare's seventh birthday party, but Scott and Jean had organized the gathering at the boathouse ("she's our granddaughter," they had pointed out) and Alex had been slightly awestruck at the sheer number of children present. Although apparently he wasn't the only one so awed. 

"It is our reward," Piotr replied, not taking his eyes off of the free-for-all soccer match being played on the other side of the lawn from where they sat. Piotr's three - Diego and Tania currently had a brother Patrick - were joined by the Logan twins, Dane, Nate and Alison Guthrie, Clare, Harry Wisdom, and Inez and Maria Drake (Bobby and Cecilia having followed Piotr's lead and adopted abandoned mutant children) in a rather rambunctious game, complete with frequent complaints of the use of telekinesis to cheat and Clare insisting that it was her birthday and she could cheat if she wanted. Bobby was the unfortunate referee and every time he'd look towards them seeking rescue, Alex would smile and wave. And not budge. 

"A gift," Scott mused. His voice sounded different and Alex looked at him. Scott was facing the other direction, watching Colin and Ray play silently together. They were building some sort of dirt castle.

"Hey guys," Scott called to his sons and they looked up, heads tilted at precisely the same angle in matching expressions of curiosity and interest. Alex tried to squelch the uncomfortable feeling of _weirdness_ that ran through him every time the twins did something like that. It was like it was out of a movie. The Logan twins, whom Piotr affectionately called 'unique' and everyone else called the very obvious results of the admixture of Sulven and motherhood, had never been so attuned to each other and disinterested in everyone else. 

"Why don't you go play with everyone else for a little while? The dirt's always going to be here."

The twins were three and had quickly mastered every skill set they had needed - according to Jean, even potty training was going blissfully well. And they _could_ talk aloud - Alex had had an interesting conversation with Ray about toy cars the other month - but they simply didn't see the need to interact with anyone else on a regular basis. Scott had said something about sending Ray, the non-telepath, to regular pre-school next year just to force the two of them to look outside themselves.

Colin and Ray just blinked, then went back to their dirt castle.

"Or maybe not," Scott sighed and Alex didn't know what to think at his brother's bemused resignation. "They say they're happy."

While Piotr and Alex had been talking about everything and nothing - public schools, Sarah Marrow's persistence in trying to get Callisto to do a videotaped oral history of the Morlock tunnels, Alex's forthcoming article in _Earth Surface Processes and Landforms_ , and the rumor that two of Piotr's oil paintings were going to be acquired for display by the Museum of Modern Art - the three men seemed to find the relative quiet comfortable and watched the dozen screaming children chase the soccer ball (and Bobby) across the lawn without much talk. 

Fatherhood agreed with Bobby in a way that Alex suspected surprised a lot of the others. It had surprised him a little, too, but only until he'd really thought about it and then it had seemed obvious. Adopting Inez and then Maria hadn't sobered Bobby any more than marriage had - and that hadn't. But it had changed the depth of his mirth, had made him more aware of what amused others. Being with Cecilia had made him more aware in general, but now he was less clownish and, in fact, a funnier man. Which was remarkable for the head of the XSE's budget and accounting offices. 

Despite the ice goalposts being at the other ends of the lawn, it was only a matter of time before the ball came speeding towards the trio. Before either Piotr or Alex could say anything, Scott raised his hands to his glasses and gave the ball a quick optic blast, sending it speeding into the pack of onrushing children much to their delight and Bobby's disappointment - he had been exhorting the children to kick at the adult they were most closely related to. 

Eventually Kurt came out to join them and the quartet was soon involved in a discussion about New Lands politics. A case was before their highest court concerning alleged anti-baseline human bias in the New Lands civil service; the four of them thought the case was frivolous and should be thrown out - the complainant had inferior credentials to the mutant he'd been passed over for - but Kurt wondered if it was not a no-win situation for the New Lands. To dismiss the case would raise accusations of more bias and favoritism, to grant it merit would legitimize the unworthy claims of a bitter candidate who had simply not been the best available person for the job.  It was too close to the race politics that plagued other nations, Kurt suggested, and there would be no clean way to end the situation.

Personally knowing two non-mutants who had found successful careers in the New Lands - his wife and Ji-Won - Alex found the whole mess extremely unappealing, even as he ultimately agreed with Kurt. There were too many similar situations in the various realities that he'd been in - anti-mutant, ant-human, the desolate reality where the entire Earth had been subjugated as a prison colony. As the conversation started to drift towards Betsy Braddock Worthington's recent appeal before the WHO for international standards regarding the care and treatment of child psis, Alex excused himself. With all of the kids still outside, there was a dim chance that one of the bathrooms would be free.

On his way back outside, Alex was intercepted by Nathan. 

"A moment, Alex?" Nathan asked, gesturing towards the currently unoccupied den. Alex followed.

Nathan sat down heavily in the chair closest to the window. The bright afternoon sun did nothing to cover up his pallor, Alex noted.

"What's up?"

His heart sank as Nathan sighed before speaking. 

"You remember what happened in the realities you visited, correct?" Nathan asked, making it sound like a test question. Alex nodded. "Do you know if a reality can be reproduced?"

Alex made a face. "Realities don't repeat," he replied, sitting down on the couch adjacent to Nathan's chair. "You can't possibly line up all of the factors that make a reality unique and recreate them. It's not like cloning a sheep or a baby... Err. Sorry."

Nathan seemed to ignore the Stryfe reference. He was visibly tense and while everyone else seemed inclined to pass it off as a headachy psi in a house full of children, Alex was sure that it was something much more serious. Lily had been putting in too much overtime and coming home too stressed for him to accept the first convenient excuse of it being unrelated to 'business.'

"Realities operate in a higher dimension than the timeline," Alex went on when Nathan's silence grew. He was staring at the floor, Alex thought, or his shoes, or off into space. "Like two-space versus four-space. There are too many variables... at least I've never come across anyone or anything that's even bothered to try it. Why?"

"How many realities were you in where Apocalypse was a factor?" Nathan asked suddenly, looking up at him with an intensity that forced Alex back in his seat. 

"Actively running around?" He rifled quickly through the mental Rolodex. "Three, four, maybe. A couple of times I had my suspicions, but he was never positively identified. One where he had a cult but was otherwise missing. That one was pretty weird; he'd stuck with the Egypti..."

"What was the cult like?" Nathan leaned forward, pushing himself towards the edge of his chair with his cane. There was a brittle frustration to his voice, Alex noted, aimed partially at himself, partially at the situation, and perhaps partially at him for being the Nexus of All Realities and not being able to immediately follow his mental trail. "How did they operate?"

Doing his best to ignore Nathan's agitation and what it could mean, Alex screwed his face up as he remembered the details. "Egyptian-like. He called himself the Eternal Pharaoh, or at least that's what his cult called him. They all had blue scarab tattoos and called each other 'brother'... And now I'm going to repeat my earlier question and actually expect you to answer: Why?"

The den door slammed shut from a telekinetic shove and the shades over the windows fluttered at the sudden change in the air patterns.

"The Scions of the Morning Fire are collecting artifacts that were required for the awakening of Apocalypse," Nathan said seriously. "En Sabah Nur is going to be back in this reality, probably as a cloned child to be raised in his predecessor's image." 

Alex tilted his head dubiously. "You're sure this isn't simply setting up an altar to an absent god?"

Nathan growled, his eye glinting dangerously bright. "Of course I'm sure. The time stream is clear on _that_ part."

Alex stood up, not wanting to be eye-level with Nathan and be glared at. It was disturbing and it was annoying. Instead, he rolled his neck and then his shoulders and walked to the other window. He could see Scott, Piotr, and Kurt still talking, although the children were nowhere to be seen. And it dawned on him that nobody else knew what was going on else they'd be here with them. Maybe Lily did, but simple professionalism kept her from speaking about it. But Scott, Bishop, Sam, Kurt... did _Domino_ know what was going on? 

"Could it be one from another reality? An import?" He asked, knowing the answer. He'd have felt it if it had. But before he committed to taking part in any of Nathan's schemes, he wanted to know precisely how good the information was. Because Alex was sure that he was going to be asked to make some very hard choices and he would be damned before he'd risk losing this reality on a shot in the dark.

"No," Nathan replied, sounding almost relieved. "The chaos doesn't happen immediately. It's a longer-term process, a steady escalation."

Alex nodded understanding and leaned against the bookcase nearest the window. An adult Nur would explode onto the scene. "So if we're looking at Apocalypse Redux being a sure bet, what is the time stream _not_ clear on?" 

He didn't pay any especial attention to XSE daily matters; his only real involvements were his training sessions and his status as an emergency reserve member. He had lost the fight to not be Commander Summers should an emergency arise - it wasn't a question of his participating, he was, but of carrying a field commander's rank. Alex did not doubt his own command skills - he probably had more experience there than anyone but Nathan or Bishop - but he didn't like the idea of swooping in in the middle of a crisis and trying to command someone else's troops. That was just asking for casualties. 

"It's not clear what happens to the new Nur." Nathan turned towards the window suddenly, as if he had seen something in his peripheral vision, before turning back to Alex. "Apart from the fact that whoever ends up with him ends up with control of the time stream."

Alex pushed himself off of the bookcase without unfolding his arms. "Whoever ends up with him...? You want to recruit En Sabah Nur's clone?"

"What I _want_ is irrelevant," Nathan snarled, banging his cane on the ground with anger. "If the choice is between undoing the Merge and raising the Nur-child myself, there is no choice!"

"I'm not arguing that," Alex snapped, turning back to the window. He'd never liked the way Nathan got _petulant_ in a crisis, like a child stuck playing with toys meant for younger children, and it was all he could to turn away rather than give in to Nathan's frustration and snarl back. "I don't know why you aren't working to prevent the clone from being hatched in the first place, that's all." 

"We can't," Nathan muttered, obviously trying to scale back his emotions. "The details aren't materializing. We can't get a fix on them. A cloning facility should be obvious near Akkaba, but we haven't found one."

A few months ago, when Nathan had dragged him into his office at the Tower, he'd told Alex person-to-person that he'd be needed. "I need you to think about what you can do as the Nexus of All Realities instead of just what it takes you away from," had been the words. Alex hadn't forgotten them. Quite the contrary, they had rattled around in his mind ever since, an unhappy specter of what lay ahead. In the early days of his return, Alex had kept himself sane by insisting that the worst was over, that his hell had ended and he was back where he had started and where he wanted to be. But even then, Alex had known that that wasn't the truth. It wasn't over. He wasn't sure it ever would be.

"Why am I here, Nathan?" he asked simply. "Why am I here in a room with you when the entire XSE command is celebrating your daughter's birthday in blithe ignorance of the danger we're all in?" 

In all of the times he'd been properly identified as the Nexus of All Realities - which was really only a couple of times, although he'd been outed as not being the 'real' Alex Summers more often - nobody had ever attempted to kill him permanently. He wasn't sure it was possible, even, and the thought of being truly eternal scared him like nothing else could. No rest, no heaven, no peace, just a timeless drifting from reality to reality with no stopping point planned. 

"Have you ever taken anything with you between realities?" Nathan asked instead, sounding almost conversational. "Do you think you could?"

Logan could get maudlin and start talking about the fatigue of being so hard to kill and how he was grateful he didn't have most of his memories so he couldn't be sure how long he had really been roaming around. But Alex did remember everything and wasn't sure there was such a thing as an amnesia that was good for the entire multiverse.

Unlike Logan, he didn't get maudlin when he thought about the persistence of his survival. He got cold, frozen from within. What could he have possibly done, what sin could he possibly have committed that his punishment was to roam the multiverse as guardian and ghost, the singular constant in every reality, both possible and impossible? 

"Alex?"

He shook his head to clear his thoughts and looked back at Nathan, who was watching him. 

"People, sort of." He frowned at both the question and its answer. "If I time it right. Which means we both have to die at the same moment..." 

It had been an accident the first time, he and a young fighter - probably that reality's version of one of the Gen X kids - had been trapped and cornered and then killed in the same explosion. He had been reaching out to try to shield Tara from the blast and had woken up next to her in a hospital. She'd wanted to travel with him, be a companion like some weird version of _Dr. Who_ , but he'd left her in that second reality after he'd gotten himself killed in an ambush. It had been for the best, he'd subsequently discovered. 

The first time he'd tried to make a transfer intentionally, it had failed. Badly. It hadn't been the only choice, just the most convenient one at the time and Alex had been sickened by realizing that he had killed someone (even it had been an enemy) through such painful and gruesome means when it had been avoidable.

The first successful attempt had been dragging a Jean with him - they had been running for their lives, the last and only survivors of a Resistance in a reality where Hitler's grandparents had immigrated to America and he had risen to power as a Father Coughlin-type demagogue based in Peoria, using radio to launch himself into the public eye and his father's immense wealth to build a private lab to supplement the military once he became President. By the time Alex had arrived, experiments on mutants were being performed on the Discovery Channel and they had both known that Jean dying in the attempt to leave was a better fate than what the future held for her should she be captured. But she hadn't died and they'd ended up in a reality where the two of them had 'died' in a car crash en route to a Christmas party. It had been a reality where mutants hadn't existed and they had both been out of sorts with the sudden loss of their powers, but it had been a peaceful reality and Jean had chosen to stay there to spend her days with a Scott who had never been orphaned or suffered brain damage and had in fact gone into the Navy and become a pilot solely to piss off their father. That reality's Alex Summers had been a CIA agent and he'd died trying to break into a chemical weapons factory in Marseilles after France had suddenly pulled out of both NATO and the UN.

"It's not in body, though," Alex warned, brought back out of his reverie by Nathan's throat-clearing. "It's like how I usually move between realities - body stays, consciousness goes."

Nathan looked thoughtful and... relieved? Alex moved back to where he had been sitting. The sun had moved into his eyes and he was seeing spots. "Are you going to tell me why you want to know or you going to be quietly enigmatic and just leave me to panic?"

"I... We need a contingency plan," Nathan said, no trace of either anger or frustration in his voice. The voice of Commander Nathan Summers, who had been forced to acknowledge his limitations, and not that of Cable, who only saw everyone else's. "The timeline, should the Scions end up with the Nur-baby is... untenable. We are at the same point we were seven years ago: one chance to prevent the rise of Apocalypse."

There was a knock on the den door, startling them both. Nathan closed his eyes and furrowed his brow slightly and, after a moment, Alex could hear footsteps going away.

"Nathan," he began quietly. "I'm going to ask you this once: please don't make me leave this reality unless it's the last option. I'm not going to pretend to be brave about this; I'm _scared_ of what lies ahead of me."

Nathan looked at him consideringly and Alex wondered if he wasn't rethinking his decision to involve him and not someone else.

"You are braver than you know," Nathan said with an oddly gentle tone. He was looking down at the floor between them - it was an ugly area rug, one of the several Jean had acquired in Alaska and Scott hadn't managed to convince her to hide - and Alex wondered if Nathan ever made eye contact when he was speaking from his heart or whether the words themselves were concession enough. 

"I didn't choose you either randomly or because I was feeling uncreative," Nathan went on, looking up at Alex. The moment having passed, he was back to his professional voice. "You are the only choice. If I can't get that baby, then he _has_ to be taken out of the timeline. Or else there is no more timeline." 

Alex was about to ask a question, but Nathan shook his head and he closed his mouth and was again struck by the differences between the 'old' Nathan and the new one. Cable would have tried to glare him into silence and submission. 

"Nobody else here is strong enough to protect the child," Nathan explained matter-of-factly. "I _know_ this. Every possibility coming out of my death combined with a successful retrieval leads to the same bad end that comes out of the Scions raising the child."

"What about killing the child?" Alex finally asked, hoping the question didn't sound so ridiculously obvious in its selfishness. But it was a viable question. "Erasing him from the timeline that way?"

"Lily's provided a wide variety of catastrophic results," Nathan replied, not sounding like he'd considered the question self-serving. He sounded more resigned, as if he had known all along that none of the simple answers would work. "It had been my first thought should I fail. But the baby is such a massive nexus point that his death by violent means warps the time stream beyond recognition."

"If I take the baby from this reality, I'm going to have to do it by killing him," Alex pointed out after a moment that felt like an eternity. "Won't that do the same damage?"

"No," Nathan replied with an ugly, sardonic smile. It would have been a Cable smile except for the bitterness. "Transferring a consciousness doesn't qualify as death, apparently."

They were quiet then, and Alex could hear the faint chorus of 'Happy Birthday' from the other side of the house. 

"I think they call it Hobson's choice," Nathan said as the last strains of the song disappeared. "If I die saving the child, then you can either stay for the unavoidable end of the world or you can leave and save it."

"I lose my life no matter what," Alex concluded, leaning back in his seat and rubbing his face vigorously with his hands. "Jesus, what a mess."

"It is," Nathan agreed evenly. "But I don't intend to fail."

At the ferocity of the words, Alex opened his eyes and looked at his nephew. Nathan looked so _calm_. As if he were simply saying that he was going to take a walk, not that he was going to kidnap a clone of Apocalypse...

"How much does everyone else know?" Alex asked. The answer was 'not much,' but he was hoping for something a little more specific. 

"Enough to be helpful and not enough to be in the way," Nathan replied and Alex had to laugh. So typical. "Telling Scott and Bishop that they have been mathematically proven not to be up to the task at hand..."

It was a lame excuse, even if it was a valid one, but he wasn't going to call Nathan on it.

Instead, he stood up. "Come on, then," he said, not really wanting to think about this anymore. "If this is the last birthday party we're going to, then let's at least get cake."


	31. December 2012

"And here? That's why I carried tranquilizer darts," Alex told the trio of young officers, two men and a woman, as they walked through the paused simulation. "Because you _can't_ let them get away or make a noise and while most of these ops won't give you nightmares, killing a kid will."

Staley, Brosiak, and Hernandez all nodded quickly. They looked chastened and Brosiak looked vaguely sickened at the eight-year-old boy lying on the ground with half of his face blown off by a bullet. 

The request had come from Scott: run a tutorial for the Black Ops training course. Alex had initially demurred, telling his brother that he wasn't comfortable reliving - let alone relating - some of his darkest moments. But Scott had persisted, insisting that just because Alex wanted to pretend that those parts of his life hadn't existed didn't mean that they'd go away. It was spotty reasoning, but a week later, at Clare's birthday party, everything had changed. And so here he was.

"You want a break, Brosiak?" Alex asked neutrally. "No shame in needing air."

Glenn Brosiak, beta-level aquamorph, shook his head no. "I'll be fine, sir."

Alex nodded, but didn't move the trio away from where the solid light projection child lay in the throes of death, frozen in that moment of time. Everyone had to learn their own limits, to become comfortable with them and to know which ones can be stretched. So instead, he went back into the discussion on non-lethal methods of subduing non-combat personnel, periodically pausing for Sulven - upstairs in the control booth for this part of the exercise - to advance the just-completed simulation to another reference point. Alex had created a scenario that did not bear any particular relation to his own experiences, although he'd admit that that was more to make him feel better than out of any consideration for his charges.

It had been precisely three weeks and five days since Nathan had told him that the Scions of the Morning Fire were planning to clone En Sabah Nur, twenty-six days since Nathan had asked him to be prepared to save the world by leaving it. Alex had not had a moment's peace since then. 

"Staley, I want you to pay attention here," he went on, pointing out a second-story window from where two snipers had been able to get off three shots each before they had been taken down. Agnes Staley could fire electromagnetic pulses from her hands and had taken them out cleanly, if belatedly. "You carry your NODs for a reason," he said, pointing to the night-vision goggles around her neck. "Your methods were adequate for solo work, but you have to modify your strategy within a group dynamic."

Actually, there had been peace. It had come in form of an eerie silence within his heart once he had decided to prepare for Nathan's request. Gone were all of the protestations, gone were all of the 'why me's', gone were all of the snarking whispers of a guilty conscience that had filled his ears before he'd realized that there was no choice. Leave Lily and Dane and everything and everyone he had ever loved - probably for good - or stay and watch it all be destroyed. 

"Sulven, fast-forward to the church, please?" he called out after they'd spent ten minutes discussing teamwork. "Park us right outside the door ninety seconds before interface."

A year. He had had a year with Lily and Dane, a year where he had not only found his wife and met his son, but he had also found himself, reclaiming both the original Alex he had been before this all began as well as gaining a firmer grasp on who the new Alex had to be, the conglomerate Alex. He had come to terms with what he could be, both on the 'local' level and as the über-Alex (as Kurt called him), and what he had lost forever in the unasked-for trade of the two. 

"Okay, Hernandez," he began, turning to the third XSE officer, a hulking mutant with the ability to control soundwaves. "It's your turn. What the fuck were you thinking?"

Alex disliked that with perspective had come crushing disappointment. Forced to look at things from a cosmic view, the things that had seemed so important and loomed so large shrank down to particle size. Both the good and the bad.  He hated to think of this reality as transient, a rest-stop on his journey throughout the multiverse. He wanted it to be special, to be something of stronger stuff than the rest of the multiverse, to reflect that this was the reality where his hopes and dreams had lived and died, come to fruition and faded. But he knew that that it wasn't special, not in any quantifiable sense beyond his own emotions. And that, too, was used as part of the larger plan, setting this as time and place for him to be sane, to let his guard down and recharge and replenish his energies before going back to his task. Whatever that task was. 

"Shooting first and asking questions afterwards only works if they're not dead," Alex retorted after Hernandez finished explaining himself. They finished dissecting the botched entry into the church and went inside to see how openings obscured from view from the street had been used as sentry points while having an interesting discussion on the realities of dealing with members of the clergy in the course of a mission. 

There was a greater design, a larger purpose to his travels than to just depress the hell out of him. There had to be. Alex refused to believe that his being the Nexus of All Realities was just a random, cruel joke; he'd have gone mad two dozen realities ago had he let himself think that there was no _point_ to his eternal wanderings. He had a job to do, even if he wasn't quite sure he knew what it was. So in the interim, he'd just clean up each reality as best he could and then move on and hope that whatever cosmic forces controlled his path would send him home.

"All right," Alex announced, clapping his hands together. "Now let's try to figure out how the hell the three of you managed to bumble through the entire ingress and still walk away with both the primary and secondary objectives met."

Nexus of All Realities though he might be, Alex was sure that there were forces at work greater than him to go along with a greater plan. Why else had his course been plotted thus? Why had he been tested and tempered like a blade, thrust into the fire until he could take no more and then given respite, a process that had been repeated over and over again with greater extremes? And just when he was sure he had been pushed too far, the metal of the blade tired from being worked too much, he had been brought home. Because nothing else would have healed him that time. There was a system to it all, an elusive plan designed by an unseen master. And Alex was half-convinced that the minute he figured it out, he'd become the master and not the tool. Because he was really fucking tired of being the tool. 

"Altering your pulses like that was a brilliant move," Alex told Staley as they walked along the half-paved road. "It sent everyone running towards where they _should_ have been originating from." 

The quartet spent an equal time discussing that which had gone right and that which had gone wrong before heading out of the first phase of the simulation. Sulven was waiting for them and Alex nodded to her in a silent handing-off ceremony. In this simulation, Alex had designed and graded the mission to retrieve three rebel leaders and Sulven had observed the interrogation and what had come afterwards. This was the third drill with these three candidates for the XSE's Covert Operations Unit and he and Sulven had a tentative rhythm working, mixing their two sets of experiences and the strategies they'd developed courtesy of vastly different powers.

At Sulven's voice command, the training room became an interrogation room and Alex headed upstairs to the observation booth. Nobody else was around - Black Ops stuff was officially unrecognized, but the real truth was that most of the XSE command and staff did not want to know what went on. 

Once settled in the comfortable chair in the booth, Alex allowed himself to look at the clock: 13:15.

Forty-five minutes, then. 

The phone call had come while Alex had been making breakfast. It was a Saturday and everyone had been home and for once it had been him and Dane waking Lily up instead of the other way around. She had answered the phone and it had quickly become obvious that it was Nathan as Lily had slipped into tech-heavy shoptalk. Over the griddle, one hand holding a spatula and the other making sure that Dane didn't accidentally touch the hot surface as he stood on the step-ladder and poured pancake batter, Alex had felt nearly paralyzed with dread. He'd recovered quickly, not before Dane asked him what was wrong, however, and he'd accepted the phone when Lily handed it to him. 

Nathan was teleporting to Akkaba. He'd had a dream and all of his visions had suddenly fallen into place with perfect clarity. It was today. Nathan was going in, alone, after dark. If Alex didn't get a telepathic message from him by fourteen hundred hours New York time, Alex was to get Sulven to teleport him to Akkaba immediately. 

It had been all Alex could do to swallow even a bite of pancake and make like it was only a day of teaching young adults how to kill that was dragging down his good humor. 

13:25 

Three weeks ago, after five days of swinging between self-flagellation and self-pity, Alex had come to terms with his obligations. He had had his year of recovery and if that was all that he was going to get, then so be it. And so he had begun to prepare. It was different doing so in this reality than it had been in all of the others, here where he had family and property and so many considerations.  

But it was both easier and harder to put his affairs in order than it had been seven years ago, when he had prepared for what would become known as the Battle at Akkaba. Easier in the sense that the groundwork had been laid - he had a will that only had to be updated to include Dane and not redrafted, he understood inheritance laws and had insurance policies that could not be rendered forfeit even if it was deemed that he'd committed suicide by sacrificing himself. 

The harder part was in saying goodbye. Because there would be no more closure this time than last. Because he now knew that the silence of death didn't await him on the other side, but instead a return to the cosmic hamster wheel that he'd been so profoundly relieved to escape from. Because there was no mystery as to what he was getting into and Alex knew that he was too advanced to be put back in the 'easy' realities. 

The letters were the hardest part of it all. With the will, he could fool himself into focusing on how every husband and father needed a will. And insurance. And a list of all of the important financial records, although Lily still had her hands in all of that and wouldn't need to scramble like she apparently had the first time. But the letters... He had written one each to Lily, to an adult Dane, and to Scott. All three had left his eyes bloodshot with tears as he had let his emotions run free during their composition. Explaining why he had to do what he was about to do, trying to put in insufficient words how much he loved them and what they meant to him. Asking for forgiveness from Lily and Dane, asking for Scott to be there for his family once more. He had demanded of Lily that she do her best to live with him gone, not just to survive. He trusted her in all things, was so proud of her in so many ways but most of all because of Dane. He wrote that their love would be eternal even if they weren't together and that if she ever found herself in love with someone else, she had his blessings. 

13:50

After he'd written the letters and given them to his attorney, Alex had felt a profound sense of relief. He had done what he could and now he would do as he must. And in this strange sort of quietude of soul, he had made the last three weeks count and not lose a moment of this gift. He had worked hard at his post-doc, but he had also taken Dane to the museum and to a hockey game. He had kidnapped his wife for a weekend in Montreal where they had wandered around the Old City and made love and acted like two escaped lunatics living it up before the asylum realized that they were gone. Lily had noticed the change, but she hadn't seen it as a frantic dash to cram a lifetime into three weeks. She had seen it as him making a determined effort to be part of this reality, to demand the happiness due him. And perhaps she was right.

"I suspect that our trio of protégés would be surprised to realize just how much failure is involved in success," Sulven said from the doorway as she entered. "They will learn."

14:05

Alex took a deep breath before he turned to face Sulven. How similar all of this was to the last time, right down to Sulven being the one to teleport him to Akkaba. 

"What?" she asked, furrowing her brow.

"We have a problem." 

* * *

"Are you feeling better?" Lily asked, looking up from her graphs and the running stream of data at the bottom of the screen as Dane shuffled into the room. He looked just-woken with his hair sticking out at all angles and his pajamas on. 

Dane shook his head no slowly and came over to her, trying to crawl onto her lap before she picked him up and put him there. She kissed his forehead and he still felt warm.

Dane had started off the day fine, waking her up and making pancakes with Alex and then 'helping' Lily look at the real estate website for the greater Boston area. She had all but gotten the job at MIT and would be starting in the fall semester. The plan was to move in the summer so that Dane could finish kindergarten here in New York and then start first grade up in Boston. Alex had been offered a position as well, but hadn't accepted it yet as he was still looking around at other options.  
   
"Do you want to eat something?" She smoothed down his hair. "A cracker, maybe?"

After Alex had left for the Tower, she and Dane had looked at pictures of houses on Alex's laptop - Dane seemed to be partial to anything with a porch - until he had gotten suddenly and violently ill. Lily had run him through a quick shower to clean him up and then put him to bed, just managing to put the kitchen back in order when she heard him throwing up again, thankfully in the bathroom. 

"No food," he half-whimpered. Lily hugged him gently. 

She had called Dane's pediatrician after the second time, but the advice had been to wait a while in case it was a short-course virus or food poisoning. So she'd left a message on Alex's cell phone explaining what had happened and asking him to pick up some Pedialyte on the way home. Then she'd put Dane back to bed and gone to her own computer to get some work done. 

The time stream had been erratic for the past week. The much-anticipated crisis had been upgraded from eventual to imminent by Tuesday morning, by Thursday afternoon Lily's group had produced a two-pronged extrapolation. One led to a relatively stable path, the other went straight to chaos without stopping at disorder. 

As far as everyone else knew, the crux of the situation was that the Scions of the Morning Fire had been scouring the world for objects belonging to a group known as the Celestials. Lily had only half paid attention during those information sessions because she knew that it was really only a secondary problem. The artifact hunt wasn't the real issue - that they were collecting the artifacts because they were making a Baby Apocalypse and wanted him to have his toys _was_. Alice had verified the results of Lily's semi-secret chronographic analysis a month ago; Nathan had been unsurprised at the news. 

It had been his decision to keep everyone else in the dark, a decision Lily didn't understand and didn't like. When she had confronted him on the issue, Nathan had merely said that there was more involved than chronography could tell her and walked away. 

With Dane making himself comfortable in her lap, Lily had to reach awkwardly when her desk phone rang. It was set to her cell phone's number when she was home. It was Tom and his message was simple.

"There isn't anything in bifurcation theory that can explain what just happened to the time stream," he said agitatedly. "Whatever the Scions of the Morning Fire are doing with the results of their scavenger hunt, they're doing it now."

Lily sighed in frustration, looking at the clock. It was one-fifteen and Alex wasn't due home until five. "That's just peachy. Alex is down at the Tower and Dane's sick." 

"What?" Tom asked, obviously not talking to her. "Fuck. Lily, our projection just went out the window officially. What we've got looks nothing like either of our two models. We're flying blind."

Kissing Dane's forehead, Lily sighed again. "I'll be there in a half-hour." 

She put down the phone. "We're gonna have to go to work, kiddo," she told Dane, who was already stirring. "You think you'll be okay between here and my office?"

Dane nodded and Lily carried him into his room, setting out clean clothes and taking an extra shirt just in case there was an accident. "Why don't you pick out a few books to read in case you don't want to take a nap there," she suggested. 

The holiday season was already underway, so while Lily would have taken a cab with an ill Dane in tow, it wasn't an option. The subway was relatively uncrowded for a Saturday afternoon, although the walk along 42nd street was harder than usual with the extra pedestrians. Dane held tightly on to her hand and she had to half-drag him through the sea of people. Bundled up as he was against the winter weather, Lily wasn't worried about what sort of effect Dane's illness was having on his control.

Once at the office, she parked Dane in the small open lounge area by her cubicle with his books and the blanket she had brought, tucking him in on the couch and making sure that there was a waste basket in convenient range just in case. After that, she slid into command mode.

Forty-five minutes after they'd set up the wall-sized flat-screen plasma monitor to show the four different time stream models - the two original ones, the new uncharted one, and the best working approximation of the uncharted one - the tension had dropped a notch. The surprise at the deviation from the seemingly unalterable course of the time stream had faded into a more productive urgency and Lily took a moment to go check on Dane. He was dozing, one hand curled under his chin as he lay on his side. Looking out the nearby window, she could see that the sun had fallen behind the tallest buildings to the west. Thankfully, sunset was early this time of year - Alice could probably be here by six-thirty.  

The phone rang at her cubicle and Lily got it on the third ring. She listened for a moment and then thanked the caller and hung up. 

"Tom," she called, exiting out of the other end of her cubicle towards the heart of the office. He waved from where he was standing by Miri Ahearn, who was pointing out something on her computer screen. 

"We're on alert," she said to him after she had walked over. "The XSE has just mobilized. A mass teleportation to Akkaba."

"They can do that?" Tom asked, surprised. They had all been aware of the millions invested by the XSE in mass high-speed transport. 

"They can now," was her reply. The teleportation pads had been in final testing for six months, although Lily was sure that they had sent some human test cases around the globe already. "First time for everything."

"Holy fuck!" Pete Vasiljevs was standing by the bank of monitors along the near wall. They had three televisions among the twelve screens; two were set to news channels and the third was now apparently a camera feed from Akkaba. Plasma bolts were the only things clearly visible in the darkness - it had to be midnight there, Lily realized.

"Is Alex there?" Tom asked from behind her. 

"I'm guessing," Lily replied without turning around. The office had quieted enough so that the sounds of combat could be heard even though the sound wasn't up very loud. "He was with the XSE today and they'd already talked about him coming in for this."

Lily hadn't been overjoyed, but she had understood. Alex needed to do this, needed to help out and use his skills to save lives. 

"Will you be okay?"

This time, Lily turned around. "As long as he comes home to me."

The television screen suddenly went monochrome as the night-optical lens was dropped over the camera. Faces were visible, a few Lily recognized. She muttered a quick prayer for their safety and then clapped her hands loudly. 

"Okay folks, let's stop watching and start doing. The quicker we figure out what's going to happen, the quicker we can make things go our way."

The assorted members of the team pulled their attention away from the screen with reluctance and resumed what they had been working on at a thoughtful murmur.

"Lily! Amy Dominguez on line four!"

* * *

It was probably for the best that he was going to be leaving this reality, Alex mused perversely. If he stayed, Sulven would probably kill him. 

When she had asked him what the problem was, he had told her that he needed to go to Akkaba directly. She had flown into the most composed rage he had ever seen once he had told her where Nathan was and he had barely had time to grab the backpack he had put together just for this mission before she had teleported them both to the Egyptian desert. She had spent the entire adventure cursing bitterly in Askani and Alex knew that at least part of it was directed at him personally. 

Once in Akkaba, though, Sulven had turned her attention from him to what was before them. The Fortress of Apocalypse. Or at least what was left of it; the thing had been mostly reduced to rubble. In the dark, it was hard to tell whether it had been fully raised from beneath the earth before it had been destroyed. 

"Can you sense him?"

Sulven was crouched next to him; they were both hiding behind a pile of debris a couple of hundred meters from the base of the fortress. They could hear shouts, some of anger, some obviously commands, and some wails of pain amplified by the desert quiet. There were spots of light around the rubble, a few torches and flashlights as the Scions of the Morning Fire were scrabbling around. Alex was mildly relieved to note the frantic tone to their voices even if he could only hear every other word of the odd mix of English and ancient Egyptian the Scions used - it meant that they hadn't found the clone baby. 

"Perhaps," Sulven replied in a harsh whisper, obviously frustrated at her own lack of precision. "I sense his presence, but it is weak and not... not solid. He is still alive, but his signature is so dispersed..."

"That's about to become the least of our problems," Alex hissed, gesturing with his hand towards the far end of the expanse of rubble. "I count about five dozen lights. Is that the sum of the reserve force or are those just the guys coming to move the rubble from the door?"

The dozen or so men they had been watching would have been easy to dispatch on his own, let alone with Sulven's help. But it would be too much of a distraction to fight an army when he should be looking for the baby. 

"There are more on the way," Sulven said as they began to hear the metallic clink of arms and armor. The new arrivals were well prepared. "I've called for backup."

The shouts picked up and Alex got worried that they had found either Nathan or the baby, but all they had found was another survivor of the blast. 

"I can't wait for the XSE," Alex told her as a volley of gunfire erupted nearby. He had slipped into combat mode so easily, as if a year of playing civilian had been proven to be just that - playing. "We don't have that kind of time. Not when we don't know what's going on inside."

Sulven nodded and pointed. "That hole over there, next to where the parapet has fallen in. It's the closest point of entry."

Alex found the spot and looked around. There were only two Scions near enough to it to cause any trouble, but he'd need to take out the four standing on a tall pile of rubble that stood directly along the straightest path between it and where they were hiding. They were looking like they were about to move away, but not at a pace quick enough that Alex would avoid being seen by the approaching armed unit.

"I'll deal with those six," he said, "You cover my back."

Sulven murmured agreement and they switched positions so that Alex was closer to where he needed to be. 

"He is one on of the upper levels," Sulven said, then frowned. "Odd that a cloning tank would be there."

"And there's the proof for why you should always check the feng-shui before you build," Alex replied, unconcerned that Sulven had no idea what he was talking about. He was amusing himself at this stage of the game. Anything not to think about what he was about to do.

Sulven gave a gesture to indicate that she was ready to provide cover.

"See you in the next lifetime," he murmured.  Taking one last look around to make sure he hadn't missed any potential problems in the darkness, he took a deep breath and set off in a dead run. 

Once he got close enough that the light wouldn't give him away to those at a distance, he blasted the far side of the pile of rubble, sending the four Scions tumbling as the ground fell away from beneath their feet. One managed to get off a volley of fire from his knees, but Alex had a plasma shield up and the bullets melted harmlessly before they could hit him. 

The two Scions closer to the hole in the exterior wall were easier to take out - a quick pair of narrow blasts destroyed their guns and a second pair took out their legs, hitting one in the knee and the other in the thigh. Alex dove through the hole as he heard a volley of automatic gunfire come past his shoulder, the last bullets hitting the edifice itself.

"All right," he muttered, brushing sand off of his XSE combat uniform as he stood up. Outside, he could hear commotion, presumably caused by Sulven. "Come out, come out wherever you are, Nathan."

There was an irregular light around a curve towards the right, the kind a torch gave off. It was probably on the ground considering where the brightest part of the light was and the condition of the hallway. The foundations might have held, but just barely and Alex hurried as he heard pieces of ceiling fall around him.

The fallen torch was across from a staircase that was shifted over, a group of steps missing entirely. Alex muttered about the building's warranty having just expired after five thousand years and tested the first step. It bore his weight, as did the second and third, so he went back down to the bottom and gave himself a running start to jump over the missing sixth, seventh, and eighth steps. He made it awkwardly, shifting his center of gravity away from the hole behind him without any grace and finishing his climb up the stairs as a crawl. On his hands and knees, he looked carefully past the edge of the stairwell and heard no voices, although he thought he could hear some sort of mechanical beeping. Security systems tended not to be a problem once he found the control unit; he could fry almost anything.

Standing up, he went carefully in the direction of the beeping.

"Great," he muttered as he turned a corner. There had been a ceiling collapse and a large pile of rubble mostly blocked the hallway. From the suddenly louder sounds of distant gunfighting and the pale light illuminating the rubble, Alex realized that the floor above him was the last to survive; anything over the third floor had been blown away. 

"You can always tell where the X-Men have been by the mess they leave behind," Alex told nobody in particular as he approached the rubble; he'd started talking to himself in combat situations back when he was still wearing the silly headdress and he'd been perversely pleased to note than many Alexes throughout the multiverse carried on running conversations with themselves. A booted foot sticking out a third of the way down was noted and then ignored. "Nathan, never say that you were never part of the family."

Climbing the rubble was easy; the ceiling had fallen in large chunks that did not shift under his weight. Peering carefully as he poked his head just above the floor, Alex could see three sets of boots and muttered a curse. They were between him and the only way out to explore the rest of the floor; in the opposite direction was a dead end. It was obvious that the initial blast hadn't happened where the men were standing, but instead further along in the direction Alex wanted to go in. There was too much of the nearby interior structural walls intact, despite the damage to the exterior wall and the mostly missing roof. Past experience said that this damage was the result of a secondary collapse.

Two of the men were standing close to the edge of the ragged lower half of what had been an exterior wall, one looking out and the other acting as a sniper. The third was behind them, reloading. 

Alex pointed his index fingers like pretend pistols and fired. He had aimed at their ankles, hoping that they would fall out instead of in. They did. The third one swung around with his newly loaded automatic and fired; Alex melted the bullets with a wide beam that destroyed the gun. The man - the _boy_ , Alex realized, as the kid couldn't be more than twenty-five, shouted out and started to run. Alex had both strength and stride and caught up to him quickly, bringing him to the floor and then kneeling on his back. 

Taking a breath to look around, Alex made a sour face. The fortress was a massive building depth-wise. With parts of roof and wall still standing and piles of rubble everywhere, it would take him a while to find Nathan. 

"Where is the cloning tank?" He leaned forward and whispered harshly into the younger man's ear. 

The Scion tried to spit at him and Alex fired a quick plasma ball not an inch from his nose. "In words this time."

"The Eternal One shall rise again," the young man growled in what sounded like a French accent. Maybe Algerian. "He will come..."

"And you're not going to be here to see it," Alex cut him off, letting his left hand grow bright with energy. The right one, on his captive's neck, he only let grow warm enough to hurt, not to burn. "Last chance before you become barbeque."

The Scion said nothing.

"You don't honestly think that even if you do get to bring up baby, he's going to keep you idiots around, do you?" Alex asked. "You're not of the strong. You're not even of the vaguely mighty. You're going to be fish food. So you might as well spill - I may not kill you. En Sabah Nur absolutely will."

The young man tried to turn his head away from Alex, who sighed. 

"Fine, but don't say I didn't give you a chance," he muttered, bringing the heel of his hand down hard on the back of the man's neck. Standing up with a grunt, he dragged the unconscious Scion over to the edge of the building and dropped him. The drop probably wouldn't kill him, not with his two buddies lying on the ground to break the fall. 

"All right, back to square one."

Moving quickly down the hall, Alex looked and listened both for voices and for anything that looked like it could be a cloning tank. He had to press himself up against a wall by a stairwell as he heard shouts, but they did not draw closer, so he proceeded. As he turned another corner, he could hear the faint whine of an alarm, the kind that comes with a medical appliance and not a security beacon. Following the noise - and ignoring the false trail caused by an echo - he found what had to have been the lab. It was covered in equipment and had once been clear and pristine. Now it was a shambles, the missing roof letting the moonlight illuminate the damage. 

"Nathan?" Alex called out in a loud whisper. Reaching behind him, he felt for the Kevlar-reinforced backpack he wore. Small and sleek and sturdy, it carried five pounds of a newly developed high explosive. Alex had experienced almost every sort of death and considered himself a connoisseur. And so with drowning not an option in the middle of the desert, vaporization would do in a pinch. He'd brought enough explosive to raze a building. Not that this one needed any help. 

He was ready. Ready for whatever came in the next reality. Past attempts at taking someone with him to another branch on the multiverse tree had shown him that he'd end up in another reality where an Alex Summers was trying to kidnap a Baby Apocalypse. It might not be for the same reasons, but they'd show up together. He really should name the baby. They were going to be together for a while - especially if the first reality they landed in wasn't right for the baby to be raised in - and he didn't want to call him Nur. 

A falling piece of rubble was enough for Alex to spin around, hands glowing. But it was just rubble... that didn't make a noise when it landed. He crossed the room carefully and while he was expecting to find a body, he was surprised to see Nathan. Holding the baby.

Crouching down and pulling the flashlight off of his belt, Alex shone it around. He didn't need to feel the baby to realize that he was dead, although he did to verify that Nathan wasn't. The tiny boy had an eerie, unnatural blue tint and as Alex reached out to close the glassy eyes, he felt... numb. He'd spent the last month preparing to lose everything in his life that held meaning and now he didn't have to. He should have been ecstatic. But he wasn't. Because lying there was a tiny bluish baby, innocent and a pawn for _both_ sides, who had paid the ultimate price. 

Alex had been willing to give up so much for this baby and, probably as some sort of coping mechanism, he had transferred that happiness with his own life into happiness for the baby's well being. But the baby was dead and Alex had to force himself not to focus on how suddenly adrift he felt and instead on the ramifications of this unforeseen turn of events. 

The baby couldn't be killed without destroying the time stream as surely as if the Scions were to raise it in the image of his gene template. But he could die. It had just not been the sort of option to build a strategy on - too high-risk. Nathan hadn't been about to play those odds when the fate of the world was in the balance and Alex had agreed with him. But in the process of agreeing with Nathan, he had forced himself to forget about that longshot third option. Because it was betting against the house and the house always wins.

Except this time.

"Thank you," he told the little blue baby, taking him out of Nathan's limp hands and wrapping him carefully in the blanket that had fallen half-off. He kissed the cool forehead, tracing a finger along the cool cheek, and placed the corpse carefully nearby. He then switched his attention to Nathan, hoping to prevent two corpses.

At first glance, Alex thought all of the damage was mental; there was a certain stillness to those who had suffered psionic injury and Nathan was looking too peaceful. But the smell of blood was too strong and Alex moved his flashlight up and down Nathan's body. There was rubble over his left leg and Alex cleared it; underneath was an ugly gaping wound. Checking again for a pulse, Alex had trouble finding it and when he did, it was thready and weak. 

"You'll forgive me for the scar," Alex muttered, his voice rough from unshed tears. He touched the wound and felt blood pulsing weakly past his fingers. Taking a deep breath and holding it, he heated up his hand quickly and then brought it down on the wound itself, trying not to hear the sound of searing flesh. He wasn't sure if cauterizing a wound that big was a good idea or not, but he couldn't let Nathan bleed to death. 

* _Sulven!_ * he screamed mentally. Any telepath within the area would have heard that. * _Sulven!_ *

# _Alex?_ # Jean's voice. # _We just arrived and Sulven's tied up. Where are you?_ #

He gave directions in pictures rather than words, mental images of where to climb and where to turn. * _Hurry._ *

With nothing to do but wait, Alex cleared the rest of the rubble away from Nathan's body and checked for other external wounds. There weren't any, but his breathing was shallow. 

BAMF!

Alex looked up to see Kurt and smiled weakly. A moment later, Sam came blasting down the hallway and into the room, landing with far more grace than Alex remembered him as having. 

"He's alive, but barely," he told them. "Psionic damage and one ugly-ass thigh wound. Breathing's erratic."

"I'll take him," Kurt said, kneeling down. He put both hands on Nathan's chest and gestured with his chin for Alex to move back. Still on the floor, Alex shimmied back on his knee pads, picking up the wrapped body of the baby as he did so. A sulfurous cloud later, Kurt and Nathan were gone.

"You all right?" Sam asked, sounding like he already knew that the answer was no. 

Alex looked up at him, the baby's body still cradled against his chest, and suddenly all of the emotions that had been held in check because of the situation were shaken free. A sob ripped through him and he gasped for air, clutching the tiny corpse tightly to him. He closed his eyes, feeling hot tears slide down dirt-stained cheeks. 

A moment later, he felt a hand on his shoulder. "Whatever it was, 'Lex, it's over," Sam said gently. "'Though I think there's gonna be a long line of people who're gonna want to wring your neck for helpin' Nathan keep secrets."

He opened his eyes, expecting to see pity. What he saw was closer to understanding and his smiled weakly. "Yeah, well," he offered with a humor he couldn't quite muster. 

"Who's that?" Sam asked carefully, gesturing to the bundle in Alex's arms. 

How to explain, Alex wondered wildly. The baby boy who could have been Apocalypse. Or could have been the XSE's greatest ally. Or could have been any one of a multiverse full of possibilities.

"Supposed to have been a traveling buddy," he finally replied. 

Sam didn't bother to hide his confusion, but he nodded anyway. "You want a lift down or would you like to take the scenic route? Battle's getting ugly fast, so we could use your help."

It was Alex's turn to look confused. He still wasn't sure how the XSE had gotten here so quickly. Sam explained about the teleportation of the ship and Alex just shook his head. 

"Let me take the scenic route and I'll clear the building from the top," he said. "This place is probably swarming with Scions on the lower levels. But... can you take him back to one of the ships? He doesn't deserve to be left here in the rubble."

Sam nodded. "I'll take him straightaway," he replied, reaching out to carefully take the bundle as if it were one of his own children. "And then I'll come back and join you for the sweep."

Sam left him then and Alex stood up, feeling a little dazed. He should be used to this feeling, the hard-fought peace of imminent death that came with agreeing to a suicide mission being shattered by the realization that survival had happened in spite of everything. But the game had never been played at these stakes. And with victory came the crumbling of that steel resolve, the one that had allowed him to get this far. Alex fell to the ground again, his reinforced kneepads sounding dully against the hard floor, and breathed deeply as he fought back tears. It was over. Allowing himself a moment to switch his focus from the deeply personal to the distantly objective, he got up and followed the echoes of panicked shouting. 

There was work to be done.

* * *

"Is there any pizza left?" Lily asked tiredly, closing her eyes and rubbing her face with her hands. Six hours staring at monitors and television screens and her eyes burned. Her eyes burned, her shoulders ached, her ass was numb, and none of it mattered because halfway around the world, it had been a lot worse. 

"Greg's wife is bringing us supplies," Tom said from somewhere off to her left. 

Greg Dimitrakos, Ubi Wadkins' second-in-command, had married a girl from his parents' village in Greece. Irini Dimitrakos was beloved by everyone because she routinely sent her husband in with trays of food. The Monday after Greek Easter had practically been a lab holiday because of the spread provided. And then there were Name Days and Christmas and all of the 'we had company and here are the leftovers' days where the lab was a happy place to be if you liked to eat.

"Irinifood?" Lily perked up, only to sag back down again as her monitor was still showing the 'filter application in process' sign. 

"Here," Miri said as she walked by, tossing something at Lily. "Take two and pass it on."

Lily looked at what she had caught. A bottle of Visine. Dutifully, she put the drops in her eyes and held the bottle out in Tom's general direction as she let the solution sting her tired eyes. Tom, who was sitting at the table in her cubicle, took it.

The computer in front of her beeped happily and Lily snarled at it. "You had better have something useful this time," she muttered crossly.

Nathan often drove her crazy by insisting on viewing the time stream as a river (it worked in a loose sense, which is why Lily used it as a simile when explaining chronography to neophytes, but Nathan knew better). But this was more a case of a railroad going off the tracks. Time flowed continuously; that was most of the reason why they could get an equation for a function in the first place. And sometimes that function could have multiple values - the one they had come up with for today's event was supposed to have two - but it wasn't supposed to come with any new alternatives on its own. At least not now, years into the improvement of chronography. Early on, wild deviation from the function had been a regular occurrence but that had been because they were not picking reasonable equations. 

But today there had been a wild deviation. And it had nothing to do with the equation - they had nursed that puppy along for months, checking and double-checking and doing it backwards, forwards, and in any system they could conceivably translate it into and it had all proved good. Until zero hour hit. 

There had been a wicked, unimagined jump discontinuity of mammoth proportions at 18:18 Greenwich mean time, and then the time stream had started a new path, one that they had been forced to scurry to try to map and understand. Six hours later, they were only partially there. 

Looking over the results on her screen, Lily muttered. While everyone else had been working on reconstructing the map of the timeline, she had been trying to figure out how a two-pronged path had developed a third option. The clone baby went with Nathan or the clone baby went with the Scions, those were the two options when all of the other variants - dead Nathan, murdered baby - were categorized. There hadn't been any case... except there had been. If the clone had died of natural causes before either side took possession. That had been the only case Alice had come up with that didn't lead directly to one of the two main branches. So that's what had happened. The clone baby had died. 

Not sure whether or not she should feel relieved, Lily clicked on the file that had just arrived from Ubi. Picking up the phone, she hit speed dial. "Amy?... Yeah, we got it. I don't see anything wrong with it, but Ubi wants to re-derive that fourth... yeah, I know, but what should I tell him? Until we get an AA above ninety-eight, he's just sitting around waiting and nobody wants to go home. It's not technically busywork... Did Eddie come up with that sample?... No, and I didn't tell Tom, either... No, I just ran it... It looks way too much like that crazy graph we came up with when we test-drove the alpha-four parameters on the 1980's... Other than the fact that I don't think Argentina is going to invade the Falkland Islands again?... No, a friend came and picked him up. He'll spend the night with Piotr and Callisto... Thankfully, no. Whatever it was seemed to pass. He even ate some pizza. My boy likes anchovies... Yeah. I'll call you if we come up with anything."

Tom was reading over his tablet screen when Lily turned around. "Rob did his magic with the sample Miri selected earlier," he said, waving the tablet. "We're looking at AA of ninety-five within a standard deviation."

Lily waved her finger in the air in mock celebration, too tired to do more. "Yay! We're only ten hours away if we work really hard, then."

Tom nodded. "Or if the little purple chronography genie comes and sprinkles her pixie dust, maybe the parameters will magically appear in the air like sky-writing."

"I thought the chronography genie was green," XhouLiong Shin mused as he walked by. 

"That's a leprechaun, ye twit," Miri called over from where she was sitting in Alice's cubicle, her brogue thick just for the barb. "He's blue." 

They were punchy and sarcastic, but while they were tired, they also knew that Rob had saved them a couple of days' worth of work. What they were all trying to do now was make up for the fact that the last three weeks of work had been wiped out - they normally mapped the time stream well in advance of actual events, but instead of working in units of weeks in terms of lead time, they were working in units of hours. If Lily hadn't been so stressed, she might have taken a moment to appreciate that they were all prepared to work through the night to be able to tell the future when civilization had been doing just fine for millennia living moment to moment.

Stan Myers appeared from behind the grapefruit tree next to Lily's cubicle. "Mrs. Dimitrakos is here."

Most of the next hour was spent eating and relaxing. Lily didn't mind the work slowdown and in fact encouraged people who were working through the break to stop and eat. Progress had slowed to a crawl anyway; everyone was fried from the constant stress. 

The first three hours since everyone had arrived had been split between trying to start the processes that would re-create the map of the time stream (a task largely foisted off upon Amy Dominguez and the staff in the New Lands, all of whom had been called to work in the middle of their night) and trying to serve as an oversight/auxiliary arm to the XSE detachment in Akkaba. 

The New York lab was normally quite effective in providing short-term support for XSE action, but this time it had been a strain with their resources - namely a working map of the time stream - not in place and running at speed. The fight had been excruciatingly long considering the number of people involved and Lily had eventually been forced to tell Pete to turn off the video feed in the main room - she wasn't the only person with a loved one in combat.

After the fight had ended, they switched back to focusing on recreating their map. The staff at Midnight Sun had given them a good head start and Lily was pleased with how quickly things had progressed from hopelessly muddled to bad-but-recoverable. But the adrenaline that had sparked them earlier had faded and now, after six hours, it was starting to drag a little bit. 

Which was why the food delivery was a blessing in more ways than one. There was a tray of moussaka, a roasted chicken with potatoes, and a salad bowl that was big enough to go swimming in. And yet Irini was apologizing for bringing bakery cookies. Irini didn't stay - her mother-in-law was sitting in the double-parked car with which she had driven the food in from Astoria - but Lily made a mental note to have a thank-you card passed around and to pick up a small gift. 

By the time the eleven-o'-clock news was over, Lily was more than an hour into a conference with Alice, Tom, Miri, and then Amy and Bob Sagerstein via telephone from the New Lands. Courtesy of a lucky series of errors by the Three Stooges (the trio of computational fluid dynamists; Tony was bald, Ping had a Moe 'do, and Larry was just opportunely named) that hadn't been caught until after it had been run through most of the tests, they had found a shortcut. HisDAs had been able to provide documentation and Miri had _somehow_ managed to design a sample that could pass Rob's muster. Ubi was positively aglow and had locked himself in the small conference room with Greg Dimitrakos and Dennis Lim so that they could work without interruption. 

"All right," Lily said tiredly after Alice and Sagerstein had paused in their sniping. "Amy? How long are you running people without breaks?"

"Everyone has to walk around the block once every two hours," she replied. "Except me, of course. I roll around that block more than once and my arms fall off."

A chuff of weak laughter; Amy's arms were pure muscle - she raced in mini-marathons.

"We're hitting the three hour mark here," Lily mused. "I think I should call a timeout and we'll get back to you in a little bit? We've basically done what we needed to do while we are all in earshot."

Relieved goodbyes were said and the phone hookup disconnected. 

"Jesus, I am so happy I'm half a planet away from Sagerstein," Lily muttered as they exited the room. "But I'm serious about a break." She went and stood in front of the giant plasma screen television and waited until everyone's attention was on her.

"Everyone's digested Irini's dinner," she began, pausing for the guys from programming to cheer wildly at the mention of food. "Which means it's been a while since our last break. Unless you'd like Tom to lead the lab in group calisthenics, I'd suggest coordinating fifteen-minute breaks with your group head. We are getting close, folks, so come back in fighting form and we'll all get to sleep until noon tomorrow."

"Or don't and we'll all still be here at noon tomorrow," Tom added from where he was standing off to the side. 

"Pessimist," Lily told him cheerfully as they headed back to their area. Tom would be succeeding her has head of the lab once she left in June; it was a choice she had wholeheartedly endorsed. 

"Realist," Tom countered. "And don't you ever put my name and 'group calisthenics' in the same sentence again. I have an image to uphold."

Lily snorted. Tom was tall and rail-thin, proud of the fact that he ate whatever he wanted, never exercised, and never gained weight.

"Aye," Miri agreed from behind them. "And the rest of us will be scrubbing the mental images of Tom in a leotard out of our brains with steel wool."

Twenty minutes later, Lily looked up from her computer at Tom, who had his coat on. "What is this, 'do as I say and not what I do'?" he asked, pursing his lips in displeasure. "Oh, wait, that's _exactly_ what this is. Let's go take our walk."

"Honestly, Tom?" Lily asked with a sigh as she rubbed her eyes and wondered who had Miri's Visine. "I am going to finish this and spend my break napping. But thank you for the offer."

Tom looked at her skeptically. "You had better be on the couch with your eyes closed when I get back or I'm getting Sergeant Ndega to frog-march you outside."

"Yes, sir."

By the time the clock beeped to indicate midnight, Lily was on the couch with her feet up on the coffee table and her eyes closed. She wondered when Alex was getting back - the last transport had left Akkaba two hours ago, which meant that it was going to be sooner rather than later. She hadn't spoken to him, but they had gotten a list of the dead and wounded and his name hadn't been on it. Nathan's was on the list of wounded, to no one's great surprise, as was Bobby's, which was. 

Lily had asked Alice to make sure that she was awake and at her desk by twelve-fifteen, but it was half-past when she was shaken gently awake. 

"You needed it," Alice told her without remorse.

By one, things had progressed such that they had started sending people home. The group heads were staying on and the entire math squad was still sequestered, but there was a quiet to the office that hadn't been present earlier.

At a quarter past one, the phone rang. Not expecting it to be Amy, Lily wondered who it could be. 

"Summers."

"Yeah? Me, too." Alex's voice sounded tired. Exhausted, really. "You weren't in bed and you weren't in your office, so I looked under the couch and when you weren't there, either, I decided to try you at work."

She was tired enough that this was very funny.

"How are you feeling?" she asked. "Were you hurt at all?"

"I'm... okay," he replied, sounding to Lily's ears like he was anything but. When Alex was tired, his voice got lower and almost craggy.  But now there was also a tremulous tone that she associated with him putting on a brave face and not quite succeeding. "I was expecting things to be a lot worse than they were, I guess, and I haven't really absorbed that it's not."

"It _was_ pretty bad," she pointed out. He wasn't saying something, that much was obvious. The question was what was it that he wasn't saying. 

"Yeah," he agreed weakly. "Where'd you stow Junior, by the way?"

"Amanda picked him up from here around sevenish and took him to Piotr and Callisto's," Lily replied, accepting the change in topic for what it was. He could dodge her over the phone, but not around the house. At least not for too long. "He was sick earlier today. He got better by the evening, but it was so sudden. One minute he was discussing his preferences for wrap-around porches and the next he was revisiting his pancakes. And then the shit hit the fan here and in Akkaba..."

"Busy day for everyone, then."

There was a cry of exultation and Lily looked across the office at where Dennis Lim had just come running out of the small conference room with his arms raised in victory. 

"Yeah," she replied into the phone.

"You going to be there for a while longer?" Alex asked and Lily closed her eyes at the sound of _need_ in his voice. He was trying to cover it up, make it sound casual and vaguely hopeful that she was on her way out, but she wasn't buying it. It wasn't the 'come home and let's have sex like crazed rabbits' reaction that used to manifest back in the days when Alex was Havok and had been dragged off to do something with the X-Men. This was something less primal, more emotional. Not survivor's guilt, not post-battle adrenaline, but something else that made him sound entirely too fragile for Lily's comfort.

"Not too long, I imagine," she said, looking at the clock. "I've been here almost twelve hours and some of the folks have been here for closer to eighteen. And the math people are doing the end zone dance like they just scored the Superbowl-winning touchdown, so..."

"All right," Alex said, sounding relieved. "If I'm asleep, wake me up?"

"I'll think about it," she told him, knowing full well that he wasn't going to be asleep. Not when he sounded like this.

Alex blew a raspberry into the phone and Lily laughed. 

"I'll see you later," she said. "Love you."

"I love you, too," Alex returned and then they hung up. 

Lily stared blankly at her computer screen for a long moment before getting up and heading over to Tom's cubicle. 

"Alex is home," she told him.

"He all right?" Tom asked, turning his attention away from where he was watching Ubi leaning over Pete's shoulder explaining what was on the latter's computer screen. If the math squad was already giving material to the programmers, things were looking well. 

"He says so, but he's lying," Lily admitted. "Would I be a bad boss if I left now?"

Tom looked at her like she had just asked to have an arm cut off. "I think we'll forgive you," he said dryly. "You're no help with getting the kinks out of the coded version anyway. Get out of here and I'll see you on Monday."

"Thanks," Lily said, putting a hand on his shoulder for a moment before turning back towards her desk. Booting down her computer and throwing on her coat, she still felt vaguely guilty walking past those who were still working, but nobody said anything apart from wishing her a good morning.

At a quarter to two in the morning on a Saturday night, the subway was full of early-retiring clubgoers and revelers and people returning from Christmas parties. Lily felt vaguely amused at the contrast, coming home from working a crisis as she was. 

Alex was standing at the bedroom window looking out at either the street or the stars when she found him. He gave her a lopsided grin and she crossed the room into his embrace. The day had been relatively mild for December, but the night had gotten quite chilly and Lily reveled in Alex's warmth.

"You look more or less intact," she finally said against his chest. She hadn't missed the bruise on his hip that was only half-hidden by his pajama bottoms.

"For now," he agreed, sounding vaguely amused and less fragile than he had on the phone. But he was holding her closely and with greater strength than usual. "I think I'm going to have to run the gauntlet once everyone recovers a little."

"What did you do?" 

A long pause, long enough that Lily pulled away slightly and looked up at Alex's face. His eyes were closed and a single tear was running down his left cheek. She wiped it away with the back of her fingers. "Alex?"

"Nathan and I were keeping a secret," he said quietly, not opening his eyes.

"The clone baby?" Lily asked. "I guess everyone's going to be pissed about that... But that's not it, is it?"

Alex turned from her and went towards the bed, but she followed behind and sat down next to him, prepared to physically force him to look at her.

"We had a plan," Alex said, facing her but looking down at the hands in her lap rather than at her face. "For how to solve the problem..."

"Apart from the obvious one of getting the baby?"

"That was the preferred option," Alex said, smiling a wry, bitter smile. "But Nathan wanted to keep the odds in our favor. Even if we got the baby, if something happened to him..."

"The results would have been the same as if we hadn't," Lily finished for him impatiently. "I know all this stuff, Alex. The only ways to make sure we didn't all go to hell in a handbasket were to either get the baby or if the baby died on its own, which I'm guessing is what happened."

Alex sighed heavily and ran his fingers through his hair. "It did, but we weren't considering it an option," he said. "There was a third possibility, one with much greater odds of success should Nathan fall."

Lily felt her stomach drop and she was suddenly sure she was going to hear something very bad that she was going to wish that she didn't know. "And it involved you," she said with a calmness she didn't feel. 

Alex nodded. "If the baby no longer existed in the timeline, the problem was solved," he said, getting up off of the bed and going back to the window, looking out as he spoke again. "I'm very good at getting things out of timelines if I have to."

Realization hit with the force of a slap. "Alex! You were going to... Oh, god. Oh, god... And you had this all planned out without _telling_ me? You were going to disappear and not even say goodbye? How..." It was all she could do to sit still, to not give in to her instinct to pummel the man in front of her into pulp. "How _dare_ you make that decision without me?"

"I couldn't tell you," Alex insisted, tears flowing freely now. "I didn't want our last time together to be all crazy and angry and... I wanted to spare you and Dane the pain. I wanted to spare myself."

"That's no..."

"I didn't have a _choice_ , Lily," Alex cut her off, crossing to the bed and taking her hands, holding on tightly as she tried to pull away. She didn't want to touch him, didn't want to be in any position where she had to sit and listen to him. Because there had to be some sort of rational sense to what he had done - Alex had changed so profoundly in the time he had been away, but he had not become a coward and he had not gotten reckless with her feelings or anyone else's - and she didn't want to face the fact that maybe he _hadn't_ had a choice. 

"I didn't have a choice," he repeated in a quieter voice after she stopped struggling. "I could either break your heart or be responsible for your death. Again."

"What 'again'?" Anger was fading into fear and confusion.

Alex closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "You asked me once if I had encountered other versions of you," he began. "And I said that I hadn't because I had met you by trying to be a civilian and most Alexes weren't... But I lied."

Lily just watched, not able to even begin to form words. She had been through this before, that hateful moment when she realized that she _couldn't_ understand everything, that there was going to be a part of Alex that she was never going to be able to get because he was so different from her. At first it had been when Alex confessed to being a mutant. And now it was because he was the Nexus of All Realities. She'd tried not to think too hard about that, not make it something more special than any of the other things that Alex did - plasma blasts, reality hopping, what's the difference? - but it was her own denial and she knew that. 

"So far, we've been married in two other realities," he went on. "Both times where you were a mutant... I watched you die, Lily, because of a stupid mistake I had made. _Me_ , not the other Alex. Me. And in the other reality, you had already died because of my counterpart's actions - inactions, apparently. But it was still me in a way. How could I do that again? How could I let you die because I wasn't strong enough to make the hard choice?"

He was crying now, they were both crying, and he sat on the bed heavily, putting his face in his hands for a moment before turning to look at her again. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry I would have had to hurt you. And Dane... Oh, god, Lily, I didn't want to have to do it. But I couldn't... I love you so much. I love our son so much. I couldn't be the one to..."

"I know," she said, her voice barely audible even to herself. "I know. I hate knowing. I hate all of this. I hate you being the Nexus of All Realities because it hurts you and me and Dane and everyone you love. I hate the thought of you wandering around the cosmos like some eternal ghost... "

They were both quiet then, too exhausted to do anything else but cry and be drowned by all of the emotions that were swirling around. Lily eventually leaned over to get the tissue box and the two of them blew their noses heavily, using tissue after tissue until they could only laugh at their taking turns tossing them towards the trash can. 

When they had finished with the tissues, Alex tentatively took her hand. She squeezed and he squeezed back and they sat there in the quiet, the faint sounds of a car horn coming from the street below.

"Where do we go from here, Alex?" Lily asked. "I'm not ready to let you shoulder all of this on your own. Not in this reality. You can have the entire rest of the multiverse to yourself, but in this one, I want in. I don't care how much it hurts. I didn't marry you because you make a sexy martyr."

A chuff of laughter. "No, you didn't," he agreed, turning to look at her before she could accuse him on not taking her seriously. "I'll do my best, Lily. I promise you I'll try. But don't ask me to cause you pain just so you can feel less guilty for not being able to help carry everything."

She grimaced at his too-accurate read on the situation. But even as dignity demanded she protest, Lily knew that she was too exhausted to talk about this any further, so she nodded reluctantly instead. This would probably not be the only time they had this discussion anyway; they were who they were. 

As the silence crept on and the fatigue seeped further into her bones, Lily finally got up, kissed Alex on the cheek, and headed into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. By the time she came out to dig out her pajamas, Alex had shifted over so that he was lying in bed and when she got in herself, he stirred suddenly as if she had woke him from a light doze. As she lay down and stared up at the ceiling illuminated through the closed blinds by the full moon and the permanent light of the city, she could hear the grind and whine of a garbage truck down on the street.  She felt drained, too tired to sleep even, let alone to think through the events of the day or to consider what might have been. Instead, she focused on what was and reached for her husband, letting her hand rest on his warm shoulder. And so she fell asleep to the syncopated rhythms of Alex's steady breathing and the clink of glass meeting plastic meeting metal as the garbagemen slung trash bags out on the street below.


End file.
